Vehicles as Weapons of Terror - September 2023

ISIS claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack two days later, calling Lahouaiej-Bouhlel a “soldier of the Islamic State.”1 The attack in Nice, though not the first of its kind, was the deadliest modern vehicular terrorist attack2 in Europe, launching a wave of terrorist and ISIS-claimed vehicular attacks around the world. [...] In the first attack, the assailant used a car to ram into a police officer before exiting the car and stabbing him. [...] A car drives into a group of soldiers on the side of the road at the entrance to the village of N’ima near Ramallah, injuring two. [...] A Palestinian suspect drives a pickup truck to the Israeli side of the Maccabim checkpoint along the northern West Bank, where he makes a U-turn and strikes a group of off-duty soldiers walking along the road. [...] The utilization of vehicle rammings in protests by both the right and the left dates to at least 2016 with street protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile-long underground oil pipeline in the United States.