Stabbing Attempt at Jerusalem’s Lion’s Gate

Meanwhile, several users commented on the outfits of Palestinians involved in the resistance efforts, which were mainly denim pants and T-shirts, suggesting that the younger generation remained strong in defending their rights despite a few “Westernised” habits.

In Monday’s first stabbing, an 18-year-old Palestinian identified as Mustafa al-Khatib attacked a policeman with a knife at an entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City and was shot dead by security forces.

Frustrated Palestinian youths have defied president Mahmud Abbas as well as an Israeli security crackdown by rioting in annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

On October 3 two people were killed, and two more injured, when an Arab man stabbed them while walking near the Lions’ Gate, which goes into the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Though I may come to regret it for the rest of my life, I’d rather have qualms than think that I might have been maimed or killed.

Earlier on Sunday, a 31-year-old Palestinian woman was critically injured after she drove her vehicle to the a-Zaim checkpoint east of Jerusalem and set off a gas cylinder. The other victims were lightly wounded. The Israeli military said hundreds of Palestinians rolled burning tires and threw rocks at Israeli forces, who responded with 0.22 caliber rounds.

Israel said the air strike targeted two arms workshops of Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip.

The reluctance to apply the term is indicative of its symbolic power: when Knesset member, Haneen Zoabi, from the Joint List (the coalition of Arab-dominated parties in the Knesset called) for “popular support” for those resisting the restrictions in the Old City, Netanyahu asked the attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, to open a criminal investigation on the basis of incitement to violence.

It is unclear if the use of an explosive device was meant to escalate daily Palestinian stabbing attacks on Jews which have been underway for more than a week but which thus far have not included setting off explosions in Israeli cities. Israel captured all three areas in the 1967 war. The attacker was shot dead by other officers. The account was disputed by a Palestinian passerby, who said he witnessed the incident and saw no knife. A Border Police officer suspected the man and ordered him to stop for inspection and take his hand out of his pocket.

Let’s start by conceding that the status quo in which Israel holds the West Bank in a wary partnership with Abbas and the PA is unsatisfactory to both sides.

Israel also said Monday that YouTube had taken down Palestinian videos that the Jewish state considered to be “inciting murder”.

Tensions have also been stoked by Palestinian frustration over the failure to make progress in peace talks towards Palestinian statehood amid Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank.

It was the latest in a rash of Palestinian attacks against Israelis.