Israeli soldiers on Tuesday evening shot and killed Livnat Grin, 20, after she charged a military checkpoint dressed as a Muslim and armed with a fake pistol.
The incident took place at the Masadat Yehuda crossing south of Mount Hebron in Judea.
The Jewish woman approached the checkpoint dressed head-to-toe in black garb, drew the weapon (an airsoft gun) and started running toward the soldiers while shouting “Allah Akbar,” (“God is Great” in Arabic).
The Israeli Defense Forces initially reported the incident as an “attempted attack.”
Before the incident, Grin posted a picture of herself dressed in black on WhatsApp and asked a friend: “If someone wants to die, an ordinary Jew, an Israeli, wearing Arab clothes, running with a fake airsoft gun toward a checkpoint in the territories, shouts ‘Allah Akbar’ because he wants to be shot because he wants to die, and then only gets shot in the legs and stays alive, do they put him in prison for that? And if so, for how long and on what charge?”
The friend responded: “That someone = you?”
Grin made national news three years ago after she was evicted from her apartment and pitched a tent in front of the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services in Jerusalem. She posted a picture of it on a IDF soldiers’ page on Facebook with a sign underneath: “A released lone soldier = a lone citizen.” A “lone soldier” is a person serving in the Israeli military that has no family in the country.
Grin, who was 24 at the time, sketched in brief a difficult life, saying she had been known to welfare services in Beersheva from a young age.
Knesset member Alexander Kushnir of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party offered to put her in touch with a social services nonprofit, but then-Defense Minister Naftali Bennett reached out to her. She ended up spending several days at his home, Ynet reported.
“He woke me up and made me an omelette. It was important to him that I wouldn’t be on the street because those were cold and rainy days. At first I was embarrassed, but later they made me feel that I had nothing to be ashamed of,” said Grin.
After that she moved to an apartment of lone soldiers and tried to find a place to live in Beersheva.
