2008 Jerusalem BMW attack

On 22 September 2008, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem's Jabal Mukaber neighborhood drove a black BMW saloon car into a group of civilians and off-duty soldiers standing on a Jerusalem street. Nineteen people were injured in the attack. The driver, identified as Qassem Mughrabi (also referred to as Qasim al-Mughabi), a 19-year-old, was shot dead at the scene by an off-duty soldier, Lt. Elad Amar.

According to Wikipedia's account, the attack was the third in a series of vehicle-based attacks in Jerusalem that year, following a bulldozer attack on 2 July 2008 and a front-loader attack on 22 July 2008. The Jerusalem Post reportedly termed these incidents "ramming terror attacks." Stratfor Global Intelligence analysts characterized this emerging tactic as less lethal than suicide bombing but potentially more difficult to prevent, noting that no single group had claimed responsibility for the series of incidents.

Lt. Amar described the incident to Army Radio, stating that the driver "drove towards the soldiers at top speed, plowed onto the traffic island, ran over soldiers and civilians and then continued, ramming into a building." Amar said he decided to shoot the driver to prevent him from reversing the car and continuing the attack.

Accounts of the assailant's motive and identity diverged. The Palestinian Ma'an news agency reported that Mughrabi was a member of Hamas. However, Mughrabi's family disputed that the incident was a terror attack; his father, Mahmoud Mughrabi, said his son did not have a driving license and had lost control of the vehicle, calling it "a car accident" rather than a deliberate act. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld stated that authorities were "100 percent sure" the attack was deliberate and politically motivated.

In the aftermath, a number of Israeli Members of Parliament called for the demolition of the assailant's family home as a deterrent against future attacks.

The Wikipedia article situates this incident within a broader pattern: articles in publications including New York Magazine, Breitbart News, Haaretz, and The Times of Israel have cited this and related Jerusalem attacks as early examples that foreshadowed the wave of vehicle-ramming terrorist attacks that occurred in multiple countries during the 2010s. Writing in The Globe and Mail in 2016, journalist Patrick Martin discussed the September 2008 attack as an instance of copycat terrorism following the earlier bulldozer and front-loader incidents that same year.