Two Killed After Gunman Opens Fire

A Palestinian man grabbed an Israeli soldier’s gun and started shooting at the crowd at the bus station, Israeli police said.

The man, who was a bystander in the attack, died of his wounds late on Sunday, a spokesman for Soroka Hospital said.

The Palestinian dead have included protesters shot by Israeli forces during demonstrationsand alleged knife attackers. Fox News reported that out of the 10 people wounded, five were police officers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was acting in asystematic manner against the wave of terrorism through the reinforcement of security forces, and taking both deterrent and punitive steps.

This attack will have particularly shocked Israelis as it came not in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank but deep inside Israel itself, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Kevin Connolly points out.

Checkpoints have been set up in Palestinian areas of east Jerusalem, where numerous attackers have come from, and a few 300 soldiers on Sunday began reinforcing police.

An Israeli soldier was killed Sunday in a shooting at a bus station in Beersheba, further stoking fears of a full-blown Palestinian uprising as diplomats scramble to quell tensions.

“Israel will protect the holy sites, will guard the status quo”, said Netanyahu, adding that Israel was “not the problem on the Temple Mount” but the solution.

There is a real sense of hopelessness amongst many Israelis and Palestinians.

The bodies of 15 slain Palestinians have been withheld by the IOA, including those of 11 Jerusalemites and four West Bankers. “It’s an alarm bell that this situation [Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land] can’t continue”, al-Qak told Anadolu Agency.

There has been a spate of stabbings of Israelis – several of them fatal – by Palestinians since early October, and one apparent revenge stabbing by an Israeli.

“The global community must urgently act to curb the incitement and the encouragment of terrorism by the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, and not to plummet into initiatives such as internationalizing Temple Mount, which only encourage terrorism”, said Ben-Dahan, referring to recent suggestions to place the site under worldwide supervision. This week saw a wave of violence in the Holy Land, with deadly Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israelis and violent demonstrations across the West Bank and along the Gaza border.

Palestinians said the roadblocks are collective punishment and ineffective in deterring attackers. In that time, 40 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire, including 19 labelled by Israel as attackers, and the rest in clashes with Israeli troops. From 2002 to 2005, the Palestinian nonviolent movement that was going on alongside the violent resistance of the Second Intifada received only three feature news articles in the New York Times.

Another city, Modiin-Maccabim-Reut, midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, said “minority members” – a term Jews in Israel often use for Arab citizens who make up 20 per cent of the population of eight million – would be banned from working in its schools. Numerous attacks were carried out by residents of east Jerusalem, the sector captured and annexed by Israel in 1967 and claimed by Palestinians as a future capital. As usual, Israel has retaliated with full force, killing dozens of Palestinians, and injuring and arresting many more – a lot of them youths.