13-year-old Palestinian boy shot 2 at Israel synagogue; shooter killed

Jerusalem:

An assailant shot and wounded two people in East Jerusalem on Saturday, Israeli medics said, after a Palestinian gunman killed seven outside a synagogue in one of the deadliest such attacks in years.

Police said the suspect had been “neutralised” after the latest gun attack in the neighborhood of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s old, walled city.

Israeli police said the attacker was a 13-year-old Palestinian boy. He was a resident of East Jerusalem, the area of ​​the city captured by Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency response service identified the victims as two men aged 47 and 23, both with “gunshot wounds to their upper bodies”. The people involved were not identified.

Police had earlier announced 42 arrests in connection with Friday’s synagogue attack.

The mass shooting unfolded as a 21-year-old resident of Israel-annexed East Jerusalem walked up to a synagogue in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood and opened fire during the Jewish Sabbath.

The bloodshed, which unfolded on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked another dramatic escalation in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

It came after one of the deadliest army strikes in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades, as well as rockets fired by militants in the Gaza Strip and Israeli retaliatory airstrikes.

There are widespread calls to reduce the escalating violence, but tensions are rising.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the scene of the synagogue attack late on Friday, as crowds chanted “death to the Arabs”.

Palestinians held spontaneous rallies to celebrate the killings in Gaza and throughout the West Bank, including in Ramallah, where large crowds took to the streets shouting slogans and waving Palestinian flags.

Several Arab countries with ties to Israel, including Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, condemned the synagogue shooting.

The Lebanese group Hezbollah, one of Israel’s most prominent enemies, praised the attack as “heroic”, voicing “full support for all steps taken by Palestinian resistance groups”.

dozens arrested

The gunman was shot dead by police at the synagogue during a shootout that followed a brief car chase following the attack.

There is no indication that he had prior involvement in militant activity or was a member of an established Palestinian armed group.

A police statement said, “Fighters from the Jerusalem District Police and Border Police have arrested 42 suspects – some of them from terrorist (immediate) family, relatives and (neighbours).”

It added, “Police will conduct a thorough investigation into the links between each arrested suspect and the terrorist who carried out the attack, as well as the extent of their knowledge and/or involvement.”

In a separate statement, police said security has been kept at the “highest level” following the attack.

Israel captured East Jerusalem after the 1967 Six-Day War. The Palestinians claim the area as the capital of their future state.

Israel’s police chief Kobi Shabtai called the shooting “one of the worst attacks (Israel) has seen in recent years”.

rising violence

Nine people were killed on Thursday in what Israel described as an “anti-terrorist” operation at the Jenin refugee camp.

It was one of the deadliest attacks by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, of 2000 to 2005.

Israel said that Islamic Jihad operatives were targeted.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas both vowed to retaliate, with the latter firing several rockets into Israeli territory.

Most of the rockets were intercepted by Israeli air defenses. The army responded by attacking Hamas targets in Gaza.

There were no reports of injuries on either side, but Gaza’s armed groups vowed further action.

Following the synagogue shooting, Hamas spokesman Hazem Kassem said that the attack proved that “the resistance knows how to “get a proper response” to Israeli crimes”.

Washington announced on Thursday that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken would travel to Israel and the Palestinian territories next week, where he would push for “ending the cycle of violence”.

A US State Department spokesman confirmed on Friday that the visit would go ahead and said Blinken would discuss “steps to reduce tensions”.

At least 26 Israelis and 200 Palestinians were killed in Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2022, the majority in the West Bank, according to an AFP tally from official sources.

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