International
Mussa Qawasma / Reuters
Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, police and the army said, as a month-long spate of stabbing attacks and retaliatory measures showed no signs of abating.
A military spokeswoman said Thursday that an assailant stabbed an Israeli soldier in the head at a military checkpoint near the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which is known to Muslims as Ibrahimi Mosque. A paramilitary policeman shot and killed the Palestinian man, who was identified by local media as 23-year-old Mahdi Al-Muhtasib. The soldier was not seriously injured.
Hours later, at a nearby location, a second Palestinian, identified as 19-year-old Farouk Sidr, was shot and killed by Israeli forces when he tried to knife a soldier, who was unhurt in the incident, the army said.
Immediately after Sidr's death, clashes broke out in Hebron between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces.
This month's wave of violence, the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, has in part been spurred by religious and political tensions over a Jerusalem site sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
Increased visitor numbers by religious Jews to Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque plaza — Islam's holiest site outside Saudi Arabia but also revered in Judaism as the location of two destroyed biblical temples — have spurred Palestinian allegations that Israel is violating a "status quo" by which Jewish prayer there is banned.
Israel has pledged to abide by the long-standing arrangement at the site in Jerusalem's walled Old City and has said false allegations by Palestinian officials – echoed in social media quarters – that it intends to encroach on Muslim rights of worship have been inciting violence.
Since the latest wave of unrest began on Oct. 1, at least 62 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israelis in the West Bank and in Gaza. Of those, 35 were assailants armed mainly with knives and in some cases with guns, Israel said, while others were shot during anti-Israeli protests. Many were teenagers.
Eleven Israelis have been killed in stabbings and shootings.
On Wednesday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein warned that the latest flare-up in the six-decade-old conflict was "dangerous in the extreme."
"The violence between Palestinians and the Israelis will draw us ever closer to a catastrophe if not stopped immediately," he said.
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the bloodshed "is yet another indication of the folly of believing that efforts at permanent peace and reconciliation are somehow not worth pursuing.”
"The current situation is simply not sustainable over time,” he said.
World leaders want to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that collapsed in April 2014, to avoid a deeper slide into violence.
But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said: "It is no longer useful to waste time in negotiations" and warned a continuation of the violence could "kill the last shred of hope for the two-state-solution-based peace.”
Abbas called for "international protection" for the Palestinian people as the death toll in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories continues to rise.
Al Jazeera and Reuters
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Analysis: As Abbas' support declines and death toll rises, how long can he restrain Palestinian fighters?
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