An Israeli, in his twenties, was hospitalized on Saturday, October 22, “with a knife in the back”, after coming under attack in East Jerusalem, the eastern and Palestinian part occupied and annexed by Israel, Israeli police said.
According to Israeli media, the injured man, a resident of the town of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv, is an Orthodox Jew. “His condition is serious but stable”said Shaarei Tsedek Hospital in Jerusalem.
Police say the suspect fled after the attack on the bystander, but was later “neutralized” – the term used to say that police officers shot him – in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. He was hospitalized in serious condition.
Police said he was a 16-year-old boy from Anata, a town between Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. In the evening, she announced that she had arrested the suspect’s father and brother for questioning.
Strong tensions
This incident occurs in a context of heightened tensions between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, which have increased in recent months in the northern West Bank, a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups, but also in East Jerusalem, territories occupied since 1967 by the Jewish state, which has stepped up operations in the wake of deadly anti-Israeli attacks.
These raids, often interspersed with clashes with the Palestinian population, left more than a hundred dead on the Palestinian side, the heaviest toll in the West Bank for nearly seven years, according to the United Nations.
Some 200,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem, where 300,000 Palestinians also live. Israeli settlement, illegal under international law, has continued under every Israeli government since 1967.