Eight Injured in Taking pictures in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM — A minimum of eight individuals had been injured by gunfire outdoors the partitions of the Outdated Metropolis of Jerusalem early Sunday in a taking pictures that the Israeli authorities described as a terrorist assault.

Two victims had been in critical situation, one in every of them a pregnant girl who later gave delivery. The police stated the gunman, recognized by Israeli broadcasters as a Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, later surrendered and was arrested.

The taking pictures compounded tensions within the area lower than per week after Israel and Palestinian militants had reached a cease-fire to finish three days of combating over Gaza that left dozens of Palestinians lifeless, together with youngsters in addition to militant commanders. It was probably the most violent militant assault since a surge in Palestinian violence through the spring that killed at the very least 19 Israelis and foreigners earlier than ebbing in Might.

The police stated the gunman fired at a bus and different passing automobiles on a street that winds across the southern partitions of the Outdated Metropolis shortly earlier than 1:30 a.m., earlier than escaping for a number of hours. The taking pictures occurred southwest of the Outdated Metropolis’s Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall — and near the Temple Mount, probably the most contested holy web site within the metropolis, identified to Muslims because the Aqsa Mosque compound.

After an hourslong manhunt, the police stated that the gunman had been arrested and his weapon seized after he introduced himself voluntarily to officers. The Israeli public broadcaster, Kan, recognized him as a Palestinian resident of Silwan, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, simply south of the location of the taking pictures, that has skilled long-running friction between its Palestinian residents and a small however rising variety of Israeli settlers.

Sacred to each Jews and Muslims, the close by Temple Mount homes the third-holiest mosque in Islam and was the placement in antiquity of two historic Jewish temples that stay necessary to Jewish identification.

In latest months, it was the location of a number of clashes between Palestinian stone-throwers and Israeli riot police, amid Muslim anger on the Israeli authorities for quietly easing restrictions on Jewish prayer on the web site, ending a long time of conference that barred the apply.

After the assault on Sunday morning, an ambulance service, Magen David Adom, stated its medics discovered two males with gunshot wounds on a bus that had stopped on a street close to the Western Wall, one of many final remaining components of a retaining wall that surrounded an historic Jewish temple.

The responders additionally discovered 4 extra males with gunshot wounds at a parking space close by. A seventh sufferer, the pregnant girl, was additionally handled for gunshot wounds and later gave delivery at Shaare Zedek Medical Heart, a hospital in Jerusalem, the middle stated. An eighth individual was additionally injured, Kan reported. America ambassador to Israel, Thomas R. Nides, said on Twitter that a number of the injured individuals had been People.

The entire victims had been acutely aware and had been despatched to hospitals for additional remedy, however the mom and child, in addition to a Hasidic Jewish man, had been in critical situation, Kan stated.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid thanked Israeli safety forces for his or her work and stated in a press release, “All those that search our hurt ought to know that they are going to pay a value for any hurt to our civilians.”

Hamas, the Islamist militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, praised the assault however didn’t declare duty for it. The group stated in a press release on its web site that the assault was a response to the latest Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and a latest Israeli raid on Nablus, a Palestinian metropolis within the occupied West Financial institution.

The Outdated Metropolis of Jerusalem is steadily on the coronary heart of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel captured the realm, together with the remainder of East Jerusalem, from Jordan through the Arab-Israeli struggle of 1967, and at the moment the nation considers your entire metropolis its united capital.

However many of the world considers East Jerusalem occupied territory, and Palestinians hope that the realm, together with the Outdated Metropolis and its holy websites, will in the future kind the capital of a Palestinian state.

Tensions steadily flare in Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, partly on account of efforts to evict Palestinians that some settler leaders say are an try to forestall town ever leaving Israeli management.

There’s explicit friction in Silwan, now a primarily Palestinian neighborhood that many consultants consider was as soon as the biblical Metropolis of David — the unique capital of the Israelite King David 3,000 years in the past. Israeli efforts to construct archaeological and tourism points of interest in Silwan, largely celebrating the realm’s historic Jewish heritage, are perceived by Palestinians as a method of eroding Palestinian claims to town.

Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem, and Vivek Shankar from Seoul. Tiffany Might contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem.