{Israeli police killed a Palestinian man Thursday suspected of shooting and wounding an Israeli right-wing activist in west Jerusalem the previous night amid rising tensions between Jews and Arabs over a flashpoint holy site in the city.}
“The Palestinian, who was the main suspect in the Wednesday night attack, was eliminated at his home in the Abu Tor (neighbourhood) of Jerusalem by police special forces following an exchange of fire,” Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.
Yehuda Glick, a US-born right-wing Jewish activist was shot on Wednesday as he left the Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, near the walled Old City, in an apparent assassination attempt.
Glick is part of a movement to grant Jews greater access to a sensitive Jerusalem holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
He was attending a conference on the subject at the time of the shooting, said Moshe Feiglin, a prominent lawmaker in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Feiglin said a man approached Glick outside the conference and spoke to him in “heavy Arabic-accented Hebrew”. He then opened fire at point-blank range and fled.
“The writing was on the wall, the ceiling and the windows. Every Jew who goes up to the Temple Mount is a target for violence,” said Feiglin, who pledged to visit the sacred site on Thursday morning, a move seen as a provocation by Palestinians.
Glick was said to be in a serious but stable condition on Wednesday night, undergoing surgery for gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen.
Holy site closed
The shooting and subsequent killing of a Palestinian suspect threatens to further heighten tensions over the Temple Mount site, which has been the scene of clashes between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli police over what Palestinians see as Jewish encroachment on the site.
The elevated marble and stone compound in east Jerusalem is the third-most sacred site in Islam and the holiest in Judaism, where two ancient Jewish temples once stood. It contains the 8th century al-Aqsa mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Mohammad is said to have ascended to heaven.
Non-Muslims are allowed to visit under close monitoring but are not allowed to pray, a prohibition at the heart of the tensions.
Amid the violence, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has recently called for Jews to be banned from the site, urging Palestinians to guard the compound from visiting Jews, who he referred to as a “herd of cattle”.
Seeking to avert friction, police took the exceedingly rare step of shutting the flashpoint holy site to all worshippers and visitors until further notice, after far-right Israeli activists urged adherents to respond to the shooting by heading en masse to the site on Thursday.
Similar clashes have erupted elsewhere in east Jerusalem, the section of the holy city captured by Israel in 1967 and claimed by the Palestinians as their capital.
The violence first erupted over the summer after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed by militants in the West Bank. Jewish extremists retaliated by kidnapping and burning to death a Palestinian teenager in east Jerusalem, sparking violent riots.
The unrest continued throughout the summer after Israel attacked Gaza in response to heavy Hamas rocket fire.
Jewish settlers moving into largely Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem in recent weeks has further fueled tensions in the city.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP, REUTERS)
Leave a Reply