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31-01-2023
JERUSALEM/ NABLUS: Israeli officers on Sunday sealed off the Jerusalem family home of a Palestinian gunman who killed seven people outside a synagogue on the outskirts of the city, police said, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “a swift response”.
Seven people including a 14-year-old were shot dead on Friday in the attack on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which drew wide international condemnation and heightened fears of already spiraling violence escalating further.
It was the worst such attack on Israelis in the Jerusalem area since 2008 and followed a fatal Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank city Jenin on Thursday, the deadliest there in years.
The shooting presents a challenge to Netanyahu, who returned to power in December at the head of a hard-right nationalist government, promising to improve personal safety for Israelis after a spate of lethal street attacks last year.
The Israeli military said on Saturday it was sending additional troops into the West Bank, which has seen months of worsening clashes that culminated in 2022 with the highest death toll, including fighters and civilians, in more than a decade.
Still, there was no sign Israel was preparing for a large-scale military response to the shooting. With US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visiting this week, Israeli and Palestinian leaders were expected to try to contain violence.
After convening his security cabinet for a late-night meeting on Saturday, Netanyahu said the government would pursue sanctions against families of assailants and that he would present steps this week to “strengthen settlements”.
Sworn in a month ago, Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history has prioritised settlement building on lands the Palestinians seek for a state, though it has not yet taken major steps on the ground in that direction.
Most world powers consider as illegal Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, land it captured in the 1967 war.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has not remarked on Friday’s attack and on Saturday blamed Israel for the spiraling violence. The gunman had apparently acted alone and was shot dead by officers as he tried to flee the scene, police said.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces shot a Palestinian fighter who later died of his wounds in the West Bank Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said, as the army reported coming under fire during an operation.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the armed wing of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah movement, claimed the dead man as one of its members.
In a statement, the health ministry said “Ahmed Amer Salim Abu Junaid, 21, succumbed to critical wounds, after he was shot in the head by the occupation, this morning, in Balata refugee camp in Nablus.”
Clashes erupted early on Wednesday when troops entered the camp, the army said.
“Several suspects fired at the (Israeli) forces who responded back with live fire,” the statement said, indicating that one person was struck.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade said in a statement that it “mourns its martyr” after Abu Junaid was killed in a “confrontation with the Zionist enemy army.”
The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, reported that undercover Israeli forces had “infiltrated the camp and surrounded a house”. It added that Israeli troops fired “live bullets, stun grenades and tear gas”.
Abu Junaid was initially transferred to Nablus’s Rafidia hospital before succumbing to his wounds several hours later, Wafa said. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
