Israeli strike on Hamas in Gaza kills Palestinian woman, child

Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said that given the history of Palestinian attacks, Israel “must consider any breach of the buffer zone with Gaza to be a potential threat both to civilians and security forces”.

Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri said that Palestinians would avenge the killing of eight protesters during Friday’s clashes near the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killed a woman who was five months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter.

Palestinians carried out two stabbing attacks in Jerusalem on Saturday before being shot to death by police, while another two Palestinians were killed during a violent demonstration near the Gaza border fence. Mr Netanyahu quoted Ms Zoabi as saying to a Hamas newspaper that “hundreds of thousands of worshippers should go to the Al-Aksa Mosque to stand up against Israel’s conspiracy to condone violence against east Jerusalem residents”.

The Engineers for Palestine and Jerusalem Committee in the Jordan Engineers Association (JEA) organised on Friday a public rally in solidarity with Jerusalem, according to a JEA statement.

Benjamin Netanyahu says Sunday that the movement is a part of the “systematic, untrue incitement” against Israel that has sparked recent violence.

Hamas, which rules Gaza, remains deeply divided from president Mahmud Abbas’s West Bank-based Fatah.

The two victims, ages 62 and 65, were lightly injured, and police killed the attacker after he allegedly ran toward officers with the knife, authorities said.

He said rejecting further militarisation was unanimous because it would “give the occupation an excuse to use its tanks and open fire on the Palestinians”.

Saying that 17 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,000 wounded since the beginning of October, the PA government called on the UN Human Rights Council to quickly dispatch a commission of inquiry to the region “to investigate all crimes perpetrated by Israel against our people”.

Earlier in the day, in a nearby location, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis before being shot dead by police.

In an article for the Guardian written from his cell in Hadarim prison – his first for an global publication since 2002 at the height of the second intifada – Barghouti said he was pleading with the world as then to “to deal with [the violence’s] root causes: denial of Palestinian freedom”.

Outside the Damascus Gate entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City a Palestinian man stabbed two officers, one of them in the neck. Fears are rising of a third “Intifada” or uprising by Palestinians.

Since the latest wave of unrest began this month, eight Palestinians have been killed while carrying out attacks and 13 have been killed in protests and clashes in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinian Red Crescent later said that its ambulance crews had treated seven Palestinians shot with live rounds across the Gaza Strip, in addition to 21 who suffered excessive tear gas inhalation.

The incident followed a surge since last week in Palestinian attacks on Israelis, mostly with crude weapons like knives and rocks, and a crackdown by Israeli security forces.