Hebron : Four Palestinians were shot dead and a fifth wounded in attacks on Israelis in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, as violence that has fuelled concerns of an uprising showed no let-up.
The violence that has raged for more than two weeks prompted a “very concerned” US President Barack Obama to call for calm, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to chair a weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday. Including alleged assailants, 41 Palestinians have been killed since the violence erupted on October 1, while seven Israelis have lost their lives. The mounting death toll has prompted fears of a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising, like those of 1987-1993 and 2000-2005, when thousands were killed in near-daily violence.
Three of Saturday’s attacks took place in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron, where some 500 Jewish settlers live in a heavily-guarded enclave in the city centre surrounded by nearly 200,000 Palestinians. A fourth was at a checkpoint in a Jewish settlement neighbourhood of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, and a fifth at another checkpoint. All of the incidents involved a Palestinian assailant attempting to stab an Israeli, with at least four of the attackers shot dead. In Hebron, 18-year-old Fadel al-Kawatsmi tried to stab a settler before his intended victim, who was unharmed, shot him dead, the army and Palestinian security sources said. Video circulated by Palestinian activists showed a young man wearing a kippa brandishing a pistol as shots rang out before Israeli soldiers moved in to pull him away from a body lying on the ground. Also in Hebron, a Palestinian teenage girl tried to stab a female Israeli soldier outside a border guard base before being shot dead by her would-be victim, and a Palestinian man was shot after stabbing and moderately wounding a soldier, though it was unclear whether the assailant was killed.
Elsewhere in the West Bank city, troops opened fire at stone-throwing Palestinian youths, wounding 11 with rubber bullets and one with a live round, Palestinian medics said.
