Israeli police killed a Palestinian man Thursday suspected of shooting and wounding an Israeli right-wing activist in west Jerusalem the previous night amid rising tensions between Jews and Arabs over a flashpoint holy site in the city.
"The Palestinian, who was the main suspect in the Wednesday night attack, was eliminated at his home in the Abu Tor (neighbourhood) of Jerusalem by police special forces following an exchange of fire," Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.
Locals identified the man as 32-year-old Moataz Hejazi who was released after a decade in an Israeli prison in 2012.
He was suspected of being behind an attack on Yehuda Glick, a US-born right-wing Jewish activist who was shot on Wednesday as he left the Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, near the walled Old City, in an apparent assassination attempt.
A spokesman for the centre said Hejazi had worked at a restaurant there.
Glick is part of a movement to grant Jews greater access to a sensitive Jerusalem holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
He was attending a conference on the subject at the time of the shooting, said Moshe Feiglin, a prominent lawmaker in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Feiglin said a man approached Glick outside the conference and spoke to him in “heavy Arabic-accented Hebrew”. He then opened fire at point-blank range and fled.
“The writing was on the wall, the ceiling and the windows. Every Jew who goes up to the Temple Mount is a target for violence,” said Feiglin, who pledged to visit the sacred site on Thursday morning, a move seen as a provocation by Palestinians.
Glick, 48, remains in a serious but stable condition, doctors said Thursday.
‘Declaration of war’
The shooting and subsequent killing of a Palestinian suspect threatens to further heighten tensions over the Temple Mount site, which has been the scene of clashes between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli police over what Palestinians see as Jewish encroachment on the site.
The elevated marble and stone compound in east Jerusalem is the third-most sacred site in Islam and the holiest in Judaism, where two ancient Jewish temples once stood. It contains the 8th century al-Aqsa mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Mohammad is said to have ascended to heaven.
Non-Muslims are allowed to visit under close monitoring but are not allowed to pray, a prohibition at the heart of the tensions.
Amid the violence, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has recently called for Jews to be banned from the site, urging Palestinians to guard the compound from visiting Jews, who he referred to as a “herd of cattle”.
Seeking to avert friction, police took the exceedingly rare step of shutting the flashpoint holy site to all worshippers and visitors until further notice, after far-right Israeli activists urged adherents to respond to the shooting by heading en masse to the site on Thursday.
But that decision looked only to cause further anger, with Abbas calling it a “declaration of war”.
"This dangerous Israeli escalation is a declaration of war on the Palestinian people and its sacred places and on the Arab and Islamic nation," his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina quoted him as saying.
Intifada
On Thursday, crowds of young Palestinian men and boys blocked off the streets where Hejazi was killed with rubbish skips and lit small fires. They smashed tiles and bricks and used the pieces to throw at Israeli police, masking their faces with bandannas or pulling hooded tops around their heads.
Police responded with at least one canister of tear gas, scattering the crowd, although it quickly returned.
“It is not a good situation, it is the worst, everyone is angry,” said Galib Abu Nejmeh, 65, who wandered down the rock-strewn street dressed in a smart brown suit and tie.
“It is becoming like another Intifada,” he said, comparing it to the scenes in east Jerusalem in the late 1980s, when Palestinians first rose up against Israeli occupation.”
Militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad praised the shooting of Glick and mourned Hejazi’s death.
“We praise his martyrdom that came after a life full of Jihad and sacrifice and which responded to the call of holy duty in defending Al-Aqsa mosque,” Islamic Jihad said.
Similar clashes have erupted elsewhere in east Jerusalem, the section of the holy city captured by Israel in 1967 and claimed by the Palestinians as their capital.
The violence first erupted over the summer after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed by militants in the West Bank. Jewish extremists retaliated by kidnapping and burning to death a Palestinian teenager in east Jerusalem, sparking violent riots.
The unrest continued throughout the summer after Israel attacked Gaza in response to heavy Hamas rocket fire.
Jewish settlers moving into largely Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem in recent weeks has further fuelled tensions in the city.
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