Netanyahu condemns Arab MP’s ‘provocative’ Aqsa visit

Zeid said, “The stabbing and shooting and auto attacks that have targeted Israelis are also totally unjustifiable”.

The conflicting claims to the hilltop mount lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have spilled over into violence in the past.

The focus of the Palestinian attacks appears to have shifted over the past few days from Jerusalem and cities across Israel to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and their frequency has also declined.

Palestinians are also frustrated by the failure of numerous rounds of peace talks to secure them an independent state in territories including the West Bank that Israel captured in a 1967 war.

Clashes erupted in September as an increase in Jewish visitors to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound alarmed Palestinians, who fear Israel is seeking to change rules that forbid Jews from praying there.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli police said an officer shot and killed a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who tried to stab him. Israel says it is justified in using lethal force to meet deadly threats.

Hammam Said was the third Palestinian to be shot and killed on Tuesday night, after two other Palestinian men were shot and killed by the Gush Etzion junction south of Bethlehem.

Numerous Arab assailants in one of the worst waves of Palestinian-Israeli street violence in decades, fuelled in part by tensions over a holy site sacred to Muslims and Jews, have come from East Jerusalem.

Since the beginning of October, the latest wave of violent Israeli-Palestinian conflict has killed at least 60 Palestinians and 11 Israelis.

“It is absolutely vital for Israel to take steps that empower Palestinian leaders to improve economic opportunities and the quality of life for their people on a day-to-day basis”, he said. Israel says soldiers and police are acting in self-defence.

Basel Ghattas, a Christian member of the Israeli parliament for the Arab Joint List coalition, said he visited the holy site on Wednesday morning “to show Netanyahu we don’t recognise his authority over the mosque”. A few 7,100 others have sustained injuries at the hands of Israeli forces. The statement praised the Jordanian King for his keenness to protect and preserve Al-Aqsa against its attackers.

Ambassador Eviatar Manor of Israel, who refused to attend the Abbas speech, convened dozens of diplomats afterward to decry recent “inflammatory” comments on Palestinian TV and elsewhere by Abbas.

When an Arab citizen of Israel opened fire at a bus station in southern Israel recently, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding several people, a private security guard shot an Eritrean migrant he thought was an attacker.