Israeli security forces are conducting a manhunt on Tuesday in East Jerusalem for the perpetrator of the shots that injured two Israelis near a Jewish religious site.
Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, said the injured, two men, continued to drive after the attack that targeted their car shortly before 7:10 a.m. (0410 GMT) in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. -Is annexed, and had reported it to the police, before being taken care of by the emergency services.
The attack comes in the final days of Ramadan and as Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The surroundings were cordoned off and AFP journalists saw large numbers of heavily armed law enforcement personnel deploying there.
The shots took place not far from the tomb of Simon the Just, a place of pilgrimage for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The police said they had found what they presented as the weapon used by the assailant: a “Carlo” type submachine gun, a model produced by hand by Palestinian armed groups in the occupied West Bank.
An AFP reporter saw police enter a Palestinian home surrounded by security forces as a drone hovered over the scene.
Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem said it received one of the two injured, 48, while the other, in his 50s, was admitted to Shaare Tsedek Hospital. According to these two establishments, their lives are not in danger.
The attack came as Israel marks Holocaust Day. At the sound of sirens, motorists stopped for two minutes in Jerusalem in memory of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism during the Second World War.
“Everything stops, much like the Holocaust, when all those lives were cut short. But then the beauty of this commemoration is that when the siren stops, life resumes,” says Jamie Boskey, a 44-year-old American-Israeli singer holding her child in her arms and freezing to the sound of sirens.
Israeli Mayor of Jerusalem Moshe Lion, speaking at a ceremony at City Hall, said one of the main lessons of the Holocaust was “never to be powerless against those who seek to harm us”.
Later in the morning, most of the security forces had left Cheikh Jarrah, the sector was reopened and traffic resumed normally, noted the AFP journalist.
The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was at the heart of tensions in 2021 around the eviction of Palestinian residents in favor of Jewish settlers.
These tensions contributed to the outbreak of the May 2021 war between Israel and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip.
On Monday evening, an Israeli was injured by a Palestinian woman who attacked him with a knife at the Gush Etzion crossroads in the occupied West Bank, south of Bethlehem, according to the Israeli army.
From the same source, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the assailant and “neutralized” her, before she was evacuated to an Israeli hospital, without her life being in danger, according to medical sources
The Israeli conflict has experienced a marked resurgence of tensions since the beginning of the year after the entry into office, at the end of December, of one of the most right-wing governments in the history of Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Since the beginning of the year, it has claimed the lives of at least 96 Palestinians, 19 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian, according to an AFP count compiled from official Israeli and Palestinian sources.
These statistics include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians including minors, and on the Israeli side, mostly civilians including minors, and three members of the Arab minority.
18/04/2023 12:46:05 – Jerusalem (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
