A security camera video of the attack appeared to show the girls – aged 14 and 16 – in school uniform chasing a man with scissors before being shot by a member of the security forces. Armed fighters from the al-Aqsa martyrs’ brigades, linked to president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, with which one of those killed was affiliated, joined the crowd.
Advertisement
After the latest attacks in a almost two-month wave of violence, an Israeli woman was in critical condition, while the other two assaults did not cause serious injuries. Her father, Taha Qatanani, said his daughter went to school as usual in the morning and that he heard about her death two hours later. “The terrorist was shot by a civilian and died of his wounds”, a statement said.
“A Palestinian man at Kfar Adumim junction in a Palestinian taxi tried to run over civilians”, a police statement said.
Later on Thursday, the Israeli military reported that three people were killed, including a USA citizen and a Palestinian man, and at least four more injured in a drive-by shooting and vehicular attack at a bus stop near a busy intersection in the southern West Bank.
The Magen David Adom, Israel’s paramedic agency, says that 21 Israelis have been killed within the same period – a figure that also includes an Eritrean asylum seeker killed by a mob who misidentified him as an attacker.
“A young man… was lying on the ground unconscious, with stab wounds to the upper body, on the highway next to the gas station”. Nearby, there was a young woman… approximately 20 years old, with stab wounds to her limbs. “We gave both medical treatment on the scene”, MDA medic Yitzchak Aryeh Goldfarb said.
Numerous Palestinian fatalities have been attackers, shot by their victims or security forces.
Eighty-two Palestinians in all have been killed, a few while carrying out attacks and others in clashes with Israeli forces, while 18 Israelis and an American student have been killed in Palestinian stabbings, shootings and auto rammings.
In a major departure from current USA policy, Secretary of State John Kerry will not attempt to broker a deal between Israeli and Palestinian leaders during his three-day visit to the Middle East, a State Department official said.
The attack in Jerusalem occurred on Jaffa Road, a busy downtown street near a market.
Advertisement
More than 90.000 illegal Israeli settlers live in the Gush Etzion illegal settlement bloc.
