JERUSALEM - Five members of a family, including a 3-month-old girl, were brutally stabbed in Itamar, a Jewish settlement deep inside the West Bank, Friday night.  In response to the suspected terrorist attack on the Fogel family, Israel approved 500 new housing units inside the occupied territory. 

News of the vicious stabbing dominated the news in Israel, and thousands flocked to Jerusalem Sunday for the funeral.
Saturday night, Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi said the latest violence was shocking in its brutality.

“This will have, I suspect, a long term imprint on Israeli discourse and how we view trusting the Palestinian side,” he said.

The nearby Palestinian village of Awarta remained under military curfew Tuesday, and settlers have clashed with Palestinians throughout the West Bank, reported Ma’an News Agency.

But advocates for co-existence say that neither side can retreat into its separate corners.

Aaron Barnea and Siham Abu Awwad, a Jew and a Palestinian who are members of the Parents Circle, said that two sides must keep talking.

“When an event of this kind, this quality happens … then we have to find the words and to find the ways how to translate actually our rage into human words,” Barnea said.

Both Barnea and Abu Awwad lost family members to the conflict. Those losses motivated them to join Parents Circle, a grass roots organization that seeks understanding and peace through dialogue. All the group’s members have lost loved ones to the violence.

The key to solving the conflict, Barnea and Abu Awwad say, is reconciliation between individual people.

Abu Awwad mentioned when she speaks to Israeli children, it is often the first time they have met a Palestinian. One boy was even shocked she didn’t have horns. 

Barnea cautioned Israeli political leaders not to inject Friday’s horrific killing into a larger political debate over Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the two state solution. That, he said, should be decided on a “human basis.”

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Editor's note: This article is a part of Diane Winston's Reporting on Religion class at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School in collaboration with "On Being," Krista Tippett's award-winning American Public Radio program. To see more of their work from Israel-Palestine, visit their Tumblr site reporting-on-religion.tumblr.com.