KARACHI: At least eight people — including two attackers — were killed after a deadly shooting attack in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities said, as the occupied West Bank braced itself for a possible reprisal.
Al Jazeera quoted paramedics as saying that at least 12 people were injured and six were in “serious condition” after the shooting on Monday morning at Ramot Junction.
Israeli police described the shooting as a suspected “terror attack”, Al Jazeera reported, adding that a security officer and an armed civilian shot and killed the perpetrators soon after the shooting began.
The police said the perpetrators arrived in a vehicle and opened fire at a bus station.
Four of the dead were ultra-Orthodox Israeli men, according to local media, while another was a recent immigrant from Spain.
Israeli forces closed all checkpoints between East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank after the attack, sources told Al Jazeera.
After police said the perpetrators had come from the occupied West Bank, Israeli Army Radio reported Israeli forces imposed a military cordon on four villages in the Jerusalem governorate in the territory — Qatana, Biddu, Beit Inan and Beit Duqu — and conducted raids there.
The Israeli military said it had reinforced its forces in the wider Jerusalem area and was conducting a wide-ranging search for what it described as “accomplices” in the shooting.
Palestinians in the West Bank are preparing themselves to face collective punishment from Israel in retaliation for the attack, a Palestinian journalist said.
According to an Al Jazeera journalist, Israeli authorities said the two perpetrators came from an area in the occupied West Bank that is just west of East Jerusalem.
They claimed the two worked in tandem; both gunmen boarded a bus — witnesses say one of them was dressed as a ticket inspector — and opened fire.
Israeli officials are now trying to wrap their heads around how exactly this happened, saying that they haven’t seen something like this happen in years, saying that the last shooting like this in greater Jerusalem was back in November 2023, Al Jazeera reported.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blamed the attack on the Palestinian Authority, which he claimed “raises and educates its children to murder Jews”.
But the Palestinian presidency in Ramallah said it “firmly rejected and condemned any targeting of Palestinian and Israeli civilians,” the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
The PA is a civilian ruling authority in areas of the West Bank, where about three million Palestinians live — as well as around half a million Israelis occupying settlements considered illegal under international law.
