2 wounded in another Jerusalem shooting; 42 arrested in wake of 7 killed earlier

JERUSALEM Two people were wounded on Saturday in a shooting attack around Jerusalems Old City.

A spokesman for Israels Magen David Adom (MDA) rescue emergency response service said two men one 23 years old and the other aged 47 were in serious condition, with gunshot wounds on the upper parts of their bodies.

The MDA described the incident in the Silwan area of East Jerusalem as a shooting terror attack. It said it received an emergency call about the attack at 10.42am .

Police said the suspect was neutralised, without commenting on whether he was dead or injured.

This latest attack comes a day after a Palestinian gunman shot dead seven Israelis, and hours after Israeli police arrested 42 people, including members of the gunmans family and his neighbours in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, in response.

The Israelis were shot outside a synagogue in East Jerusalem in the deadliest attack in the city since 2008 and amid one of the bloodiest months in Israel and the occupied territories, outside of a full-scale war, in years.

Israeli police said the gunman started firing at people with a handgun at about 8.15pm outside a building used as a synagogue in Neve Yaakov, an Israeli settlement in the northern tip of East Jerusalem, an area captured by Israel in 1967 and later annexed.

Three people were also injured, according to police.

One of the worst terror attacks weve encountered in recent years, said Mr Yaakov Shabtai, inspector-general of the Israeli police, after arriving at the scene Friday night.

After killing seven people, the attacker drove away in a car and was intercepted by a police squad about five minutes later, according to a police statement. He was then shot dead by police after a brief chase and shootout.

Police later described the attacker as a 21-year-old resident of East Jerusalem who acted alone, but officials did not specify his ethnicity. Both Israeli and Palestinian media said he was Palestinian.

The killings, in a Jewish area of the city, were the latest escalation of a particularly violent cycle in the region, where the situation never calm began to worsen in the spring with a wave of lone Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

That sequence prompted the Israeli army to intensify its raids on Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

The Israeli campaign led to the deaths of more than 170 Palestinians in 2022, the highest annual toll for more than 15 years, and has fuelled an intense new wave of Palestinian anger and militancy.

The attack on Friday came a day after the killing of nine Palestinians during an Israeli army raid in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank the deadliest such raid in years.

Officials from Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, praised the attack in Jerusalem on Friday night, portraying it as a response to the Israeli raid a day earlier.

Videos and photographs also showed Palestinians across the occupied territories celebrating the attack with cheers and fireworks.

This sharp rise in bloodshed has left Israelis and Palestinians across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza braced for the possibility of even greater conflagration.

And it is all coming at the advent of a new Israeli government the most right-wing in Israeli history whose leading figures have promised to take even stronger action against Palestinians and asserted exclusive rights over land that Palestinians hoped would form the backbone of a future Palestinian state. REUTERS, NYTIMES, AFP More On This Topic Seven killed in synagogue attack as West Bank violence spirals Israel hits Gaza as conflict flares after West Bank clashes