West Bank funerals attract thousands of mourners

Investigations have focused on young Jewish extremists, based largely in the occupied West Bank.

Amiram Ben-Oliel, described by Israeli media as a 21-year-old Jewish radical from Jerusalem, was charged with racially-motivated murder at Lod court near Tel Aviv.

A spokesman for Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency medical service said a 34-year-old man was taken to hospital with stab wounds to his face and hand.

Some 500 Jewish settlers live under tight guard among around 200,000 Palestinians in the southern West Bank city, where several anti-Israel attacks have been carried out in the past weeks.

The minor was also charged with involvement in four additional attacks on Palestinian property over the last 18 months and an arson attack last February on the Dormition Abbey, a landmark church that sits on Mount Zion, just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.

The attack was condemned across the Israeli political spectrum, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged “zero tolerance” in the fight to bring the assailants to justice.

The indictments came as Israel said it had broken up a ring of Jewish extremists wanted in a series of attacks on Palestinian and Christian targets.

The attacks took place before the outbreak of mass demonstrations across Israel and the occupied territories by Palestinians in protest of Israeli raids into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and continued settlement expansion.

Tuesday’s stabbing at the Gush Etzion junction is the latest in three-and-a-half months of near-daily attacks that have killed 21 Israelis since mid-September mostly in stabbing and car-ramming attacks.

At least 178 Palestinians were killed and 16,200 others were injured by Israeli forces in 2015, according to official figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The statement added that the group “condemns these heinous acts of unadulterated murder and will continue to work together with the security forces to ensure a peaceful future for all the residents of Judea and Samaria”, an Israeli phrase for the West Bank.

The case has revived criticism from rights groups which say there is a culture of impunity in Israel that allows attacks on Palestinians. The Palestinians say it is rooted in frustration stemming from almost five decades of Israeli occupation. She was moderately wounded and troops were searching for the shooter.

The Dawabsha family were sleeping in their home when it was firebombed early on 31 July, and daubed with slogans in Hebrew, including the word “revenge”.

Lawyers for the Duma defendants said they had given false confessions under torture in close-door interrogations – an allegation denied by Netanyahu and the Shin Bet security agency.

Saad Dawabsha’s brother, Naser, said he hoped the defendants would receive the maximum penalty, but was sceptical of Israel’s seriousness in prosecuting the case. “And the government was not serious in preventing it and is not serious in pursuing the killers”.

Some 25 Israelis have also died since October.