A13-year-old boy opened fire and wounded two people in east Jerusalem on Saturday, officials said, only hours after a gunman had killed seven outside a synagogue in the deadliest attack in the city since 2008.
BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Israeli security personnel work at a scene where a suspected incident of shooting attack took place,
just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, Jan. 28, 2023. (Reuters Photo)
The shooting in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem, near the historic Old City, wounded a father and son, ages 47 and 23, paramedics said. Both were fully conscious and in moderate to serious condition in the hospital, the medics added.
Police said they shot and overpowered the 13-year-old attacker, wounding him. He was taken to a hospital, they said, and there was no further word on his condition. Video showed police escorting a wounded young man, wearing nothing but underwear, away from the scene and onto a stretcher.
Authorities taped off the street and emergency vehicles and security forces swarmed the area as helicopters whirled overhead.
Saturday’s events – just a day before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was set to arrive in the region – raised the possibility of even greater conflagration in one of the bloodiest months in Israel and the occupied West Bank in several years.
On Friday, a gunman killed at least seven people, including a 70-year-old woman, in a Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem, an area captured by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in a move not internationally recognized.
The Israeli army said it had deployed another battalion to the West Bank on Saturday, adding hundreds more troops to a presence already on heightened alert in the occupied territory.
Prime Minister Benjamin said he would convene his Security Cabinet on Saturday night, after the end of the sabbath, to discuss a further response to the attack near the synagogue. Security forces launched a crackdown early Saturday, fanning out into the neighborhood of the 21-year-old gunman, who was shot and killed at the scene. Police arrested 42 of his family members and neighbors for questioning in the At-Tur neighborhood in east Jerusalem.
The earlier Friday attack, which occurred as residents were observing the Jewish sabbath, came a day after an Israeli military raid killed nine Palestinians in the West Bank, including an elderly woman.
Thursday’s raid, deadliest single incursion in the West Bank since 2002, followed a particularly bloody month that saw at least 30 Palestinians – militants and civilians – killed in in confrontations with Israelis in the West Bank.
