Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said a 16-year-old Palestinian drew a knife on officers in Jerusalem when they stopped him to ask for identification after a bystander said he was behaving suspiciously. Police shot and killed the terrorist, a 19-year-old law student.
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In the second attack, a Palestinian girl attempted to stab a female Israeli soldier outside a border guard base before being shot dead by her would-be victim, Israeli police said. The Israelis were killed in random attacks in the street or on buses. But Israel accuses him of incitement, saying he has not condemned attacks on Israelis and falsely accused them of killing a Palestinian boy who stabbed an Israeli boy. One Israeli border policewoman was lightly wounded.
On Friday, a group of Palestinians firebombed a West Bank site revered by Jews as the tomb of the biblical figure Joseph near the West Bank city of Nablus.
Violence continued Saturday, with Israeli police reporting new stabbing attempts or attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, has ordered his security forces to reduce frictions.
French Ambassador to the UN Francois Delattre had said he would circulate a draft statement appealing for calm, but there was no mention of the call for observers in previous media reports on the matter.
The holy site, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock are situated, is one flashpoint of clashes between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem. To them, part of the proof is the increased numbers of Israeli Jews visiting the Temple Mount during the specified windows of time in which non-Muslims can visit according to the unwritten rules-essentially a set of gentlemen’s agreements set up after Israel wrested control of East Jerusalem in 1967. The attacker was initially shot and wounded in the leg.
The new wave of violence is taking place in the wake of rumors that Israel plans to change the established status quo and take over the compound – a charge the Israeli government denies. For those who believe not only in the necessity, but in the practical possibility, of an equitable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-and in particular, for those who believe that the post-1967 settlement project is the root cause of the conflict-recent events have been sobering. Anyone with bad intentions would not pass through a checkpoint and instead try to reach Jewish neighborhoods through dirt roads, they said.
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday to discuss the increasingly tense situation.
At least four Palestinians have been killed in the occupied Palestinian territories, three by Israeli security forces and one by a jewish settler, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed since the beginning of the month to 42. He also said the Palestinians were unwilling to acknowledge any Jewish rights to the capital’s holy sites.
It is no accident and should not be a surprise, therefore, if a third Palestinian Intifada starts after Israelis violated the sanctity of the Islamic holy places in East Jerusalem and suggested either sharing them or dividing them between Jews and Muslims.
“Our enemies know how to hurt us, but will not defeat us”, he said.
Israeli officials say two Palestinians who were shot while trying to stab Israelis in Jerusalem and the West Bank have died of their wounds.
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Most of the attacks on Israelis have been carried out by Palestinians with no known ties to militant groups. At the entrance to the village of Issawiya, concrete blocks prevented cars from going in or out, although it was open for pedestrians, who were subject to strict personal checks. In that case, police officers were reprimanded and suffered a few sanctions, but none of them was seriously investigated for the crime a few of them likely committed – turning a blind eye to the possibility of the attack because they hated LGBT people and were not particularly interested in protecting them or in seeing gays march in Jerusalem.
