In the Palestinian neighborhood of Isawiyya in East Jerusalem, residents wait to be checked by Israeli police.
The area has been locked down by checkpoints since the middle of last week, when Israeli forces blocked the two routes in and out of the neighborhood with concrete barriers. In recent days, several new roadblocks and checkpoints have been installed in Palestinian sections of Jerusalem.
There have been daily clashes in Isawiyya since October 3, when a 19-year-old from the neighborhood was shot and killed by Israeli authorities after allegedly stabbing a Jewish boy.
Israeli police search young Palestinian men more frequently than any other group. They line up about 20 feet from the checkpoint out of Isawiyya. When called, they step forward, pulling up their shirts and the cuffs of their trousers to show they aren’t carrying weapons or explosives. Nearly all of them call home once they’ve passed the checkpoint, to let loved ones know they’re safe.
“We don’t feel free at all,” said Mousa Omar, a 20-year-old Palestinian from Isawiyya, who works in a supermarket. “We don’t feel safe either. We can’t go anywhere and they ask us where we go and when we come back. They are putting more pressure on us.”
“Now I have to leave an hour before my work starts to be on time,” Omar continued. “I feel humiliated being checked this way. I can’t see any end of this situation. It’s a war against all Palestinian people in Jerusalem.”
“They are uniting us,” said Adel Obeid. “Now we all ask about each other. The situation is difficult but we are living under occupation, so it is normal. Being checked, I feel humiliated, but what can we do? It’s oppression. What can we do? The (Palestinian Authority) president cannot help us. People are fighting alone.”
Bus station shootout leaves 3 dead
An Israeli soldier was killed in a gun attack Sunday at a bus station in Beersheba, southern Israel, according to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.
The attacker — identified by police as a Bedouin man — was killed in the shootout, but so was an Eritrean migrant who was apparently misidentified by a security guard as a second attacker, police said.
Security camera footage authenticated by police showed a chaotic scene of people rushing for cover during which the Eritrean man runs around a kiosk and is shot by the guard.
Another video from the scene, shot on a cell phone and aired by Israeli media, appears to show people angrily kicking the wounded Eritrean in the head and body, and even hitting him with a bench.
At least 10 people, four of them soldiers, were wounded in the shooting. The dead soldier was identified as 19-year-old Sgt. Omri Levi.
Police identified the attacker as Mohannad Al-Oqbi, a 21-year-old Bedouin from the town of Hura, near Beersheba. Authorities have also arrested a member of his family on suspicion of helping him, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.
The Bedouins are traditionally nomadic Arabic-speaking peoples in the Middle East. In Israel, they hold citizenship, but some of them have clashed with authorities over plans to settle them in cities.
Also Sunday, four Palestinians were injured by live fire in the West Bank, according to a spokesman for the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Saturday’s incidents, as reported by both sides:
Israeli authorities reported five knife attacks Saturday, all of them allegedly by Palestinians.
According to Israel Defense Forces, three of the attacks occurred in Hebron, one in Jerusalem and one in Qalandia. None of them was fatal, at least for the person stabbed; IDF said the Palestinian assailants in four of the five incidents were shot and killed.
But the official Palestinian version of events doesn’t always match the account given by Israeli authorities.
Hebron
Three of Saturday’s stabbings occurred in the West Bank city of Hebron.
In the first, a Palestinian tried to stab an Israeli pedestrian, but according to the IDF, the armed civilian shot the assailant dead.
WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, reported the incident as a shooting death of a Palestinian teenager. It did not mention a knife.
According to WAFA, 18-year-old Fadhil Qawasmi was killed by a Jewish settler as he walked down the street. The settler pursued and harassed Qawasmi before shooting him dead as the teen tried to walk away, the news agency said.
Qawasmi was shot four times and “left to die by Israeli soldiers who prevented paramedics from administering medical assistance to him,” according to WAFA.
In a second incident in Hebron, a Palestinian woman stabbed an Israeli border policewoman at the Ashmoret Yitzhak border police base, according to Israeli police. The border policewoman shot and killed the suspect. The officer was lightly wounded.
WAFA reported on this incident too, including allegations the woman carried out a stabbing, but the Palestinian news agency also included this caveat: “To be noted, Israeli police and army forces often resort to fatally shooting Palestinians — who are involved in alleged attacks against Israelis — while making no effort to apprehend them.”
In a third Hebron attack, a Palestinian assailant stabbed an Israeli soldier, leaving him with “moderate penetration wounds (in) his upper torso,” according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s national EMS agency. Both Magen David Adom and the IDF said that the attacker, identified by the Israel Security Agency as 16-year-old Tareq Ziad Naaman Natshe, was shot and taken along with the soldier to a Jerusalem hospital.
CNN has seen no reports of this incident from Palestinian sources.
Jerusalem
In the incident in Jerusalem, Israeli border police officers approached a Palestinian man in the city’s Armon Hanatsiv neighborhood to conduct a check when the man pulled a knife and tried to stab them, according to Israeli police spokeswoman Luba Samri.
Samri said “the policemen fired and neutralized” the suspect. Magen David Adom emergency services said that the Palestinian man died of his injuries.
WAFA, however, casts the incident in a different light.
It reports 16-year-old Mutez Awaysat was shot and killed at short range by Israeli soldiers, who quickly cordoned off the area to block journalists from the scene in “the illegal Israeli settlement.”
Qalandia
The fifth stabbing on Saturday occurred at a border checkpoint in Qalandia. According to IDF, an assailant attempted to stab a policeman but the knife did not penetrate the officer’s flak jacket, prompting the officer to fire upon and wound his assailant. When an Israeli solider then inspected the suspect, he pulled out a second knife out and tried to stab him, but was shot and killed before he could inflict any damage, IDF said.
Deadly clashes
Seven Israelis have been killed since October 1 in attacks by Palestinians with knives, guns and cars, according to Israeli officials.
Protesters have rioted in Palestinian territories, many throwing rocks, and at times Israeli security forces have used live ammunition.
Forty-four Palestinians have been killed this month in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian Authority Health Ministry spokesman Osama al-Najjar told CNN. This figure includes those killed after carrying out attacks.
This is in addition to the more than 1,770 injured by live fire or rubber bullets in the same time period, according to Najjar.
Both sides have traded blame about who is responsible for the ongoing violence. Both sides have turned up gruesome video recordings to support their claims.
Attacks not believed to be organized
The recent knife attacks have confounded Israeli authorities. They have spent millions to prevent suicide bombings with high concrete barriers and to stop rockets from Gaza with the Iron Dome anti-missile system.
But a knife is easy to obtain and carry into a crowd. Israeli authorities so far don’t believe the attacks are the result of any campaign of violence organized by militant groups.
Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza, has praised the attacks but has not claimed responsibility for them.
They are often carried out by young Palestinians who may be acting out alone, or recruited or at least encouraged via social media, Israeli authorities have said.
Civilians arming themselves
In this atmosphere of fear, many Israelis are changing the routes of their commutes, and many who have handgun permits are carrying weapons. Others are applying for permits.
The Israeli government has even called for them to do so.
A coalition of human rights organizations — including Amnesty International and the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories — has said police and soldiers are “too quick to shoot to kill” and criticized calls for civilians to carry weapons.
Clashes at holy site
Palestinian resentments are hardly new, but Israelis and Palestinians have had better relations at times.
But they have been buried by the second intifada, in which organized deadly attacks targeted Israelis from 2000 to 2005, and by three wars in Gaza that killed thousands of Palestinians.
Recent developments have made things worse.
Hardline Jewish activists have begun demanding greater access to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, in Jerusalem’s Old City, and right-wing politicians have called for the rights of Jews to pray there. Known as Haram al-Sharif or the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims, it’s also one of the holiest sites in Islam.
The Palestinian representative to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, has accused Israeli security forces of escorting Jewish hardliners onto the Temple Mount and into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Clashes at the site have become common.
