US Vice President Joe Biden implicitly criticised the Palestinian leadership on Wednesday for a “failure to condemn” attacks against Israelis, after a string of stabbing and shooting attacks occurred as he arrived in Israel.
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The Palestinians accuse Israel of using excessive force in trying to subdue more than five months of near-daily Palestinian attacks. He then went on to stab at least four people several hundred meter to the north, near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv, before being shot dead by police.
Violence has surged since Biden’s arrival in Israel on Tuesday as part of a regional tour.
Police said the attacker wounded a number of people in the Jaffa port area, a tourist zone of Israel’s commercial capital, before going on toward a restaurant and stabbing others.
Biden was to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Wednesday and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in Ramallah later.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has repeatedly called for peaceful resistance against the Israeli occupation, but has not specifically condemned a wave of knife, gun and car-ramming attacks that erupted in October. Israel says it is fueled by a campaign of Palestinian incitement compounded on social media sites that glorify and encourage attacks.
“It just brings home that it [terror] can happen, it can happen anywhere, at any time”, Biden said.
One possibility under discussion is to issue an outline of a deal to end the almost 70-year-old conflict on such matters as borders, security, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees.
According to Palestinian figures, 189 Palestinians have been killed since the current uptick in Israeli-Palestinian violence began on October 1 of a year ago.
The visit comes with Obama having acknowledged there will be no comprehensive agreement between Israelis and Palestinians before he leaves office in January 2017. Along with the Jaffa assailant, three other Palestinian attackers in Tuesdays assaults were shot and killed by Israeli security forces.
On Wednesday, two young Palestinians, aged 19 and 21, shot at a bus from their vehicle in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of northern Jerusalem, police said.
The gunman, riding a motorbike, was shot dead by police.
A Palestinian bystander was seriously injured when two Palestinian residents of eastern Jerusalem allegedly tried to run over and then shoot police officers and civilians at a Jerusalem light rail stop. Biden told reporters at the Peres Center, “We have absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to the security of Israel”.
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After his visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, Biden will travel to Jordan.
