JERUSALEM: Two Palestin-ians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed four worshippers in a Jerusalem synagogue yesterday before being shot dead by police, the deadliest such incident in six years in the holy city.
Three of the victims held dual US-Israeli citizenship and the fourth man was a British-Israeli national, police said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of inciting violence in the city and said the killings, along with a spate of recent attacks, were part of a “battle over Jerusalem”.
“As a nation we will settle the score with every terrorist and their dispatchers, and we have proved we will do so, but no one may take the law into their own hands, even if spirits are riled and blood is boiling,” Netanyahu said in broadcast remarks.
Abbas condemned the attack, which came after weeks of unrest fuelled in part by a dispute over Jerusalem’s holiest site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary — containing the Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest in Islam — and to Jews as the Temple Mount because the two Biblical temples once stood there.
A worshipper in the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood of Jewish West Jerusalem said about 25 people were praying in a service when shooting broke out.
“I looked up and saw someone shooting people at point-blank range. Then someone came in with what looked like a butcher’s knife and he went wild,” Yosef Posternak told Israel Radio.
US President Barack Obama said in a statement: “I strongly condemn today’s terrorist attack on worshippers at a synagogue in Jerusalem, which killed four innocent people.”
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the two assailants, both from Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, were shot dead by police in a gun battle outside the synagogue. Netanyahu said Israel would demolish their homes.
Israel’s ambulance service said at least eight people were seriously wounded. The four dead were all ordained rabbis.
The militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it carried out the attack, calling it a “heroic operation”.
Palestinian radio described the attackers as “martyrs” and Hamas, the dominant group in the Gaza Strip, praised the attack.
REUTERS
