A Palestinian carried out a knife attack on Saturday, injuring at least one person in central Jerusalem, and was killed by Israeli law enforcement, rescue workers and Israeli police said. “At around 4:30 p.m., an assailant stabbed a passerby near the Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem, then attempted to stab a border police officer,” Israel police said, saying they had “neutralized” the man by question.
The latter, a Palestinian, died, the Palestinian Red Crescent told AFP, while an AFP photographer on the spot saw the lifeless body of the young man on the ground near the Damascus gate, just at the exit of the Old City Jerusalem.
According to Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, the injured person is a 20-year-old Jewish boy hospitalized with stab wounds “in a condition ranging from moderate to severe.” Witness footage posted on social media shows the Palestinian lying on the ground, wounded, on which an Israeli law enforcement member opens fire on at least two occasions and from a distance of a few meters.
Similar sporadic attacks
“I give my full support to the forces which responded appropriately to this incident, neutralized the terrorist and prevented further attacks against the police and civilians in the area,” said the commander. police officer Amir Cohen.
Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Israel have been the scene from October 2015 and for months of anti-Israel attacks, most often committed by young isolated Palestinians. This violence has since diminished in intensity, but persists sporadically.
An Israeli from South Africa, Eliyahu Kay, 25, was killed along with three others on November 22 in a rare gun attack by a Palestinian member of Hamas in the Old City of Jerusalem. In the process, Israeli forces carried out an operation in a refugee camp in East Jerusalem where the assailant lived, a prelude to clashes there with Palestinians.
On Saturday evening, a spokesman for the armed Islamist movement Hamas for Jerusalem, Mohammed Hamadeh, in a brief statement accused the Israeli police “of having deliberately opened fire on an injured Palestinian lying on the ground (….) Which is a proof of brutality ”.
