Policeman killed in Jerusalem car attack
The three opened fire on police near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
A Palestinian has killed a border policeman and wounded nine other people after slamming his car into pedestrians in Jerusalem.
The rampage came hours after clashes between police and Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and sparked even more violence in east Jerusalem.
Police described the car incident, which took place on the line between west Jerusalem and the city’s annexed Arab east, as a “hit and run terror attack”.
And hours later, in the occupied West Bank, the army reported another car assault, in which three soldiers were run down.
Police said they were hit in “a terrorist attack” by a vehicle with Palestinian licence plates as they stood guard outside El-Arub Palestinian refugee camp, south of Bethlehem.
“One is in critical condition, two with moderate wounds,” army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner said on his official Twitter account.
He said that the driver fled but what appeared to be the vehicle was later found abandoned.
In the Jerusalem incident, driver Ibrahim al-Akari, whom police identified as a Palestinian from Shuafat refugee camp in east Jerusalem, hit two groups of pedestrians before getting out of the vehicle and attacking passers-by with an iron bar.
He was shot dead by police.
Citing security concerns, police ordered his family to bury him shortly before midnight and limited the number of mourners to 35.
The Jerusalem attack mirrored an incident on the same road on October 22 when a Palestinian rammed his car into a group of pedestrians, killing a young woman and a baby.
Shortly after the new attack, clashes broke out in both Shuafat refugee camp and Issawiya, also in east Jerusalem.
US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the attack as a “terrorist act” that “only raises tensions” in the tinderbox region.
EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini urged both sides to show restraint and called Wednesday’s attack “painful evidence of the need to undertake serious efforts towards a sustainable peace agreement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
But the attack was hailed by the Islamist Hamas movement, which described Akari as a “hero” whose actions were a “natural response” to Israel’s actions at the Al-Aqsa compound.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas of encouraging such attacks by sending condolences to the family of a Palestinian shot dead by police last week over the attempted assassination of hardline rabbi Yehuda Glick.
