Two Palestinians shot dead after stabbing Israeli soldier

Erekat’s remarks came after Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al Malki criticised an agreement Amman reached with the Israelis to install video cameras at Al Haram Al Sharif in Jerusalem to ease the tension there and ensure that the status quo remains intact.

On Tuesday, an Israeli hospital said Richard Lakin, a dual Israeli-American citizen critically wounded in a Palestinian attack two weeks ago, had died of his wounds.

Amnesty global stated on Tuesday that it had discovered a few of the killings of Palestinians had been unjustified, and that Israeli forces have been utilizing “excessive and illegal measures”.

Shortly after Abbas made his appeal at the United Nations human rights council in Geneva on Wednesday soldiers shot a Palestinian dead at a security checkpoint in the West Bank town of Hebron, where hundreds of militant Jewish settlers live and there is also strong support for the Islamist movement Hamas. Numerous assailants were residents of the Jerusalem neighborhoods and various curfews and closures were enforced on these areas in an effort to quell the violence, generating claims that the government was, de facto, dividing the city.

Abbas criticized Netanyahu for comments a week earlier suggesting that a World War II-era Palestinian religious leader had persuaded the Nazis to carry out a policy that exterminated 6 million Jews.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has raised the possibility of revoking benefits and travel rights of a few Palestinians living in East Jerusalem in response to a wave of Palestinian violence, a government official said yesterday.

Restrictions on visits to the Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, a Muslim holy site, and a perceived lack of progress in addressing the freedoms of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, have prompted a growing sense of frustration on the part of Palestinians.

The Jerusalem site, holy to both Jews and Arabs, has been quiet of late.

Hours later, the army said it had shot dead another Palestinian who tried to stab a soldier in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

Fifty-nine Palestinians and one Arab Israeli have also been killed, a few of them alleged attackers, while others were shot at anti-Israeli protests. But Abbas said today that “it is no longer useful to waste time in negotiations” and warned that a continuation of the current violence could “kill the last shred of hope for the two-state-solution-based peace”.

Islam Ibeidu, 23, was shot “11 times and was left to bleed to death on the ground”, said one eyewitness. More than 2,000 Palestinians have also been injured in clashes with Israeli forces, leading the Red Crescent to declare an emergency.

Lakin was an elementary school principal in the USA and taught English in mixed classes of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem after moving to Israel in 1984. On Tuesday (October 27), Israeli forces launched an air assault over the Gaza Strip in retaliation, they say, for a Palestinian rocket strike into southern Israel.