Jerusalem remains in a state of maximum alert this Saturday after suffering two attacks with a firearm in less than 24 hours, which so far have left seven Israelis dead and five wounded, in an escalation of violence. The latest attack was in the morning at the City of David Jewish settler settlement in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in occupied east Jerusalem. “As a result of the shooting there are two injured. The suspect was neutralized,” the police said in a statement about the attacker, identified as a 13-year-old Palestinian resident of Jerusalem.
The assailant “was wounded and overpowered” at the scene by armed Israeli civilians and police seized the gun from the attack. The attacker would have acted alone and is in “serious condition” according to Israeli Army radio. And according to the Al Jazzera chain, a Palestinian community leader recounted that the day before the attack, that 13-year-old boy had suffered the murder by Israeli troops of a 16-year-old friend.
The victims of this attack were father and son, volunteers for the Israeli emergency service Magen David Adom. This attack followed another that occurred Friday night, when a gunman opened fire near a synagogue in Neve Ya’akov, a Jewish settler settlement also in occupied East Jerusalem, killing seven people and wounding three more. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his National Security Minister, racist anti-Arab settler Itamar Ben Gvir, attended the scene. As part of the investigation into the attack, police arrested 42 suspects, some of them from the attacker’s family.
The attacker drove to the synagogue, opened fire and attempted to flee in his car. After a chase and shooting, the uniformed men killed him. Although his identity has not yet been revealed, the press identifies him as a 21-year-old Palestinian with no history of terrorism.
From Gaza, Palestinian Hamas militias and Islamic Jihad hailed the attack as a “heroic act” in revenge for the death Thursday of nine Palestinians in gun battles with Israeli troops during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp, the focus of the Palestinian militia movement in the West Bank. This raid was described as a “massacre” by the Palestinian National Authority, which broke the security cooperation channel with Israel. After the attack in Palestine, several rockets were launched from Gaza at Israel, which responded with bombardments in that coastal enclave blocked for years.
The Palestinian perspective
“Fear, worry and anger” feel the residents of Jenin in the West Bank, after the death of nine Palestinians in the incursion of the Israeli Army. After learning of the retaliatory attack on the synagogue, the streets of the Jenin countryside – the focus of daily Israeli raids since 2022 – were fired in the air and chants of joy among hundreds of young people. This was repeated in Gaza, East Jerusalem and West Bank cities such as Ramallah, Nablus or Hebron, where some waved Palestinian flags and others gave sweets to passers-by.
The city and the villages of the Jenin district are among the hardest hit points since Israel intensified its incursions and arrests in towns in the West Bank in March last year, after several deadly attacks committed by Palestinians on its territory.
This led to a prolonged escalation of tension in Palestinian territory. Of the 170 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in 2022 in West Bank territory — the most violent year since 2006 — 55 of them were from Jenin, sources from the Jenin Government Hospital told EFE. “The Israeli army enters and gets where it wants in Jenin. What happened on Thursday has already happened before, and it could happen tomorrow,” said a restaurant waiter.
According to Mustafa Sheta, director of the Liberty Theater cultural center in the Jenin refugee camp, raids like this only “increase outrage among impoverished youth with no prospects beyond picking up a gun and joining militias. After a the long Israeli military occupation with no way to end and the failed project for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the youth refer to “prisoners in Israeli jails or dead Palestinian militiamen, whom they see as heroes.
The streets of Jenin are full of posters with photos of prisoners and “martyrs”, those killed in combat or by Israeli fire, keys in the collective memory of a population accustomed to living with death. Yasin Salahat, father of Ezedin, a 21-year-old killed on Thursday while fighting Israeli forces in the alleyways of the refugee camp, declared with pride and restraint for his family: “My son died defending his land.” .