Their increased incursions into the mosque compound have triggered Palestinian protests across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
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Israeli border police officers secure a checkpoint near the West Bank town of Nablus, Friday, October 30, 2015.
The city, home to the supposed final resting place of the prophet Abraham – revered in both religions – is another powder-keg, and many attacks have taken place around the holy site known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs.
The move comes after Foreign Minister Murray McCully last week said more needs to be done to “jump-start” direct talks between Israel and Palestine.
Lakin, an elementary school principal and a 1960s civil rights activist in the US, worked for peace and coexistence in Israel until he was critically wounded on October 13, when two Palestinian men boarded a bus in Jerusalem and began shooting and stabbing passengers. The increasingly volatile situation was then addressed in 1997, when officials signed an agreement to partition the city into two sections: “H1”, to be controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), and “H2”, to be controlled by Israel.
Ironically, whereas this charge against the Palestinians is deeply ingrained among right-wing Israelis, they cheer the fact that many members of the Israeli government categorically reject the establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of the Jews” “biblical homeland’.
World leaders want to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that collapsed in April 2014, to avoid a deeper slide into violence that many fear could lead to a third Palestinian Intifada. The military says the soldier was lightly wounded in today’s incident.
Israel and the West Bank have been on a heightened state of alert following a wave of deadly stabbing attacks and clashes with Israeli forces.
On Tuesday, Amnesty global reported that it had documented in depth at least four incidents in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces when they posed no imminent threat, and called them “extrajudicial executions”. “In other incidents, Palestinians involved in demonstrations in the West Bank and along the Gaza fence have been reportedly shot by security forces using live ammunition – raising strong concerns again about excessive use of force”.
Settler spokesman Noam Arnon blames the violence on what he contends is the Palestinians’ refusal to accept the presence of Jews and their historic roots in Hebron.
Police have set up roadblocks in Palestinian neighbourhoods that were home to numerous alleged assailants.
He said Palestinians were informed by troops at checkpoints on Friday that Palestinian non-residents would not be able to enter these areas, Amro said.
The Jerusalem stabbing took place at a station of the city’s light railway – a frequent target of assailants in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, a Palestinian woman shot and wounded by security forces at a bus station in northern Israel was due to be released from custody yesterday after the Justice Ministry decided not to charge her.
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Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the attacker stabbed one person and attempted to stab another when he was shot by security guards near a tram line which separates Jewish and Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem. One Israeli Arab attacker has also been shot dead. But Palestinians and other eyewitnesses say he was unarmed.
