A Palestinian rammed a car into a crowded bus stop in east Jerusalem on Friday, killing two people, including a six-year-old boy, and wounding five others before being shot dead, Israeli police and medics said. , the latest escalation as violence grips the contested capital.
The attack took place in Ramot, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. Tensions have soared in the eastern half of the Israeli-annexed city, following a Palestinian shooting outside a synagogue on January 27 that killed seven people in the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in more than a decade.
The Israeli rescue service identified the two dead as a six-year-old boy and a man in his 20s. He said medics were treating five injured, including a critically ill eight-year-old boy undergoing CPR. Others, ranging in age from 10 to 40, were in moderate to severe condition. They had been waiting at the bus stop before the car stopped, police said.
“It was a shocking scene,” said paramedic Lishai Shemesh, who was driving by at the time of the attack. “I was in the car with my wife and children and I noticed a car speeding towards the bus stop and crushing the people who were waiting there.
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An off-duty detective shot and killed the suspected shooter at the scene, police added, declining to immediately identify him. Israel’s hardline national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the alleged attacker was from east Jerusalem. Speaking from the scene of the alleged attack, he ordered police to set up checkpoints around the neighborhood of Issawiya drivers to “control all vehicles” and “create a complete blockade.”
Islamic militant groups Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, praised the bloody rampage but did not immediately claim responsibility. Footage from the scene showed police and paramedics surrounding a wrecked blue Mazda that had crashed into the bus stop. Bodies lay strewn across the road.
Israel’s largely ceremonial President Isaac Herzog expressed shock and offered his condolences to the families of the victims. “Our hearts are heavy with the terrible news,” he said.
The site of a car hit-and-run attack at a bus stop in Ramot, Jerusalem, is shown above on February 10, 2023. A driver drove his car into the stop killing two and injuring five others. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, while the Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, as the capital of their future state.
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Hostilities have intensified in east Jerusalem and the West Bank since Israel stepped up incursions into the occupied territory last spring, following a series of deadly Palestinian attacks inside Israel.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 2022, making it the deadliest year in those territories since 2004, according to prominent Israeli rights group B’Tselem. Last year, 30 people were killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
So far this year, 43 Palestinians have been killed, according to a count by The Associated Press, 10 of them in a gunfight last month during an army raid on Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s new far-right government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has accused the previous government of inaction in the face of a deadly wave of Palestinian attacks last year, raising questions about its stance towards the Palestinians at this heightened time of tension.
Netanyahu’s office said it had sent more police forces to the area and ordered arrests. He and Ben-Gvir also called for the immediate closure of the attacker’s house ahead of its planned demolition.
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Israel defends such home demolitions of Palestinian attacker families as a deterrent intended to prevent future attacks. But human rights groups criticize the practice as collective punishment, prohibited under international law, that renders family members homeless who had nothing to do with the attack.
The new hardline government has announced its intention to accelerate a decades-old policy, sealing off the family homes of two attackers in east Jerusalem after a pair of shootings last month.
