Two assailants armed with a gun, knives and axes stormed a synagogue complex in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of West Jerusalem on Tuesday morning, killing at least four worshipers during morning prayers, according to the police. The attack was one of the deadliest in the city in years.
Police who arrived at the scene shot the attackers dead. Initial reports suggested that they were Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.
At least a dozen others at the synagogue were wounded, according to the director of Magen David Adom, the Israeli ambulance service.
The target of the attack was a building that housed several synagogues on a quiet street in the Har Nof neighborhood.
“This is a central synagogue in the neighborhood,” Aryeh Deri, a legislator from the Shas party who lives in Har Nof, told Israel Radio. “Jews who came to pray are lying on the synagogue floor in their tefillin and talit,” he added, referring to the men’s ritual phylacteries and prayer shawls.
The attack came at a time of soaring tensions in Jerusalem fueled in large part by a dispute over a sensitive holy site in the Old City known to Muslims as the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, or the Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as Temple Mount.
In recent weeks, Palestinian individuals have carried out several vehicular assaults and stabbings against Israelis in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Tel Aviv, killing three civilians, a soldier and a border police officer. In another episode, a Palestinian gunman from East Jerusalem attempted to assassinate a prominent Jewish activist who has pushed for more Jewish access and prayer rights at the volatile holy site. The gunman was later killed in a shootout with police; the Jewish activist, Yehuda Glick, survived.
Tensions rose again in the city on Monday after a Palestinian driver for an Israeli bus company was found hanged to death in his bus. The driver’s family insisted that he had been the victim of a lynching by Jewish extremists, setting off riots in the driver’s neighborhood, though police said an autopsy, that was also attended by an expert of the family’s choice, found there was no foul play and ruled the death a suicide.
Spokespeople for Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction, quickly praised the attack as justifiable revenge for the death of the driver.
“The new operation is heroic and a natural reaction to Zionist criminality against our people and our holy places,” a Hamas spokesman, Mushir al-Masiri, wrote in a Facebook post. “We have the full right to revenge for the blood of our martyrs in all possible means.” Another Hamas leader, Sami Abu Zuhri, called for “revenge acts to continue in Jerusalem.”
(The New York Times)
