Nine Israelis have been killed, mostly in stabbing attacks by Palestinian youths. On the Palestinian side, 48 people were killed by Israeli fire, including 27 labeled by Israel as attackers and the rest in clashes.
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Binyamin Netanyahu has met USA secretary of state John Kerry in Berlin amid a continuing storm of criticism over remarks by the Israeli prime minister claiming that the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem had suggested the genocide of the Jews to Adolf Hitler.
“We have to stop incitement, we have to stop the violence”, Kerry said in Berlin. Kerry is also expected to hold talks in Jordan this weekend with King Abdullah II, the custodian of the site, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
There has been a mounting tension across the West Bank and Jerusalem with Israel’s repeated assault of al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, particularly its enforcement of a temporal division on the compound between Muslims and Jews.
It also called for “maximum restraint and avoidance of provocative rhetoric and actions”. Police said the Israeli man was moderately wounded.
Also Friday, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released security camera footage showing several Israeli soldiers beating and kicking a Palestinian man for several minutes as he lies on the ground.
A loop of Israel’s West Bank separation barrier encircles Rachel’s Tomb, located on the edge of Bethlehem, and places it on the “Israeli” side of the barrier.
Netanyahu has pledged to maintain a decades-old “status quo” at the compound that bans Jews from praying there, and has denied Palestinian allegations that he intends to change the arrangement.
Over the same period, at least 1,900 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli gunfire, while thousands of others have suffered temporary asphyxia as a result of the excessive use of teargas by the Israeli security forces, the ministry said. The Waqf shut down the site to non-Muslims after the Sharon visit, a decision reversed by Israeli police in April 2003.
“Of course it is better but there are still checkpoints and searches”.
Over the past few weeks, Israel had barred younger Muslim men – seen by police as the main potential trouble-makers – from entering the compound on Fridays, the main day of prayer in the Muslim religious week. Israel expanded the municipal boundaries by 70 square kilometres, i.e.ten times, taking over towns and villages which had, under Jordanian rule, been independent.
(AP Photo/Adel Hana). A Palestinain protester paints his face during clashes with Israeli solders during clashes at the Israeli border with Gaza east of Bureij refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, Friday, October 23, 2015.
A Jewish Israeli man was shot and killed in Jerusalem late Wednesday during an altercation with soldiers who thought he might be a Palestinian attacker, a sign of the tension gripping the city.
Israel’s military on Friday said Israeli troops shot a Palestinian after he stabbed a soldier near the Jewish settlement of Gush Etzion south of Jerusalem.
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According to the guards, they asked the passenger for his identity papers but he then attempted to grab the gun from one of them who took him to be a “terrorist” and shot him dead, police said.
