Knife-wielding Palestinians attack Israelis in Jerusalem, West Bank

PanARMENIAN.Net - Knife-wielding Palestinians attacked Israelis in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank on Friday, October 30 and police said they had shot dead two assailants, in a further wave of violence spurred partly by tensions over a Jerusalem holy site, Reuters reports.

Four people, including another Palestinian assailant, were wounded in the incidents at an Israeli paramilitary police checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Nablus and at a tram station in East Jerusalem, ambulance officials said.

There were also violent confrontations on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah and in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians massed at the border and lobbed rocks at Israeli forces on the other side.

Around 40 demonstrators were wounded by Israeli fire, at least one critically, medics said.

This month's welter of violence, the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, arose in part from religious and political tensions over the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's walled Old City that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

A growing number of visits by religious Jews to the al-Aqsa plaza - Islam's holiest site outside Saudi Arabia and revered in Judaism as the location of two destroyed biblical temples - have stirred Palestinian allegations that Israel is violating a "status quo" under which non-Muslim prayer there is banned.

Israel says such allegations are false and that their voicing by Palestinian officials and circulation in Arab social media has been inciting the violence.

Since the latest unrest began on October 1, at least 64 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israelis. Of those, 37 were assailants armed mainly with knives, Israel said, while others were shot during violent anti-Israel protests. Many were teens.

Eleven Israelis have been killed in stabbings and shootings.

On Friday, two Palestinians used a motorcycle to reach an Israeli paramilitary police checkpoint at a junction near a Jewish settlement outside Nablus, dismounted and rushed at the troopers with knives drawn, a police spokeswoman said.

They lightly wounded one policeman before being shot by a policewoman, the spokeswoman said. One of the Palestinians was killed and the other critically wounded.