The two rode a motorbike from Jabel Mukaber, where they lived, to nearby East Talpiot, where they boarded a bus with the weapons concealed in their clothing.

Avni found other Facebook pages exhorting users to kill Jews and showing a chart demonstrating where to stab victims.

Lakin's son, Micah Avni, a venture capitalist who invests in information technology companies, became an activist campaigning to persuade Facebook not to host pages that advocate terrorism.

[9][10][6][11] Richard and Karen Lakin met as students at Boston University and were Freedom Riders who marched with the Rev.

Martin Luther King Jr.[10][11][12] After moving to Israel, Lakin taught English to mixed classes of Arabs and Jews.

[13] While Lakin's family was in his hospital room hoping that Lakin would recover, they began to see images of the attack on social media posts urging viewers to carry out similar attacks, in the words of Lakin's son, Micah Avni, the posts included, “specific instructions on how to slice someone’s chest open and cut their intestines like what was done to my father.”[6][14] Avni joined relatives of three other Americans who had lost relatives to terror attacks in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or the West Bank from 2014 to 2016, to file suit in New York federal court on July 12 2016 accusing Facebook of knowingly providing "material support" to Hamas.