Eight people were injured, two seriously, in an armed attack on a bus in Jerusalem (Israel), Sunday August 14, according to local police. “Police have been notified of a shooting at a bus near David’s Tomb”she said, before the scene was cordoned off. “The terrorist is in our hands” then went Eli Levy, a police spokesman, at Kan Public Radio (in Hebrew).
Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, said it intervened after receiving reports of shootings at a bus in Jerusalem. His spokesman, Zaki Heller, for his part, reported seven injuries, “all conscious, one woman and six men, two of whom are in serious condition”. Spokesman for Shaarei Tsedek Hospital added that medical teams had to carry out a caesarean section of a pregnant woman. “She remains intubated and in serious condition. The infant was delivered and is in stable condition.”
“I was coming back from the Wailing Wall. The bus was full of passengers. I stopped at the Tomb of David bus stop. At that moment the shooting started.”testified the driver of the bus, Daniel Kanievsky to a small group of journalists on the spot. “I saw two people on the bus bleeding. Everyone was panicking”he added, in front of his bullet-riddled bus, at the foot of the Old City of Jerusalem.
A military escalation in recent months
“Anyone who wants to harm us should know that they will pay the price for any harm to our civilians”, reacted in a press release Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid. For its part, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, welcomed a “heroic operation” without formally claiming it. “Our people will continue to resist and fight the occupier with all means”Hamas added in a statement.
By spring, 19 people – mostly Israeli civilians – had been killed, mostly in attacks by Palestinians. Three Israeli Arab attackers were also killed. In the process, the Israeli authorities stepped up operations in the occupied West Bank. More than 50 Palestinians had been killed, including combatants and civilians, in operations and incidents in the West Bank.
Last week, the Israeli army carried out a “preventive operation” against the Islamic Jihad, an armed Islamist movement, in the Gaza Strip, which responded with salvoes of rockets against Israel. At least 49 Palestinians, including Islamic Jihad fighters but also children, died in this weekend of military escalation which ended last Sunday with a truce favored by the mediation of Egypt.