JERUSALEM: A Palestinian gunman made a brazen choice of location for a deadly rampage on Sunday: Driving a speeding car, he opened fire at civilians near a light rail stop opposite Israel\u2019s national police headquarters, on the main road that runs between West Jerusalem and the predominantly Palestinian eastern part of the city.
\nHe then fled in the vehicle to a nearby Palestinian neighborhood, where he exchanged fire with police officers from a special counterterror unit who had chased him on motorbikes, according to the police.
\nSoon after, a border police unit arrived in the Palestinian neighborhood and shot the gunman dead. The police identified him as a 39-year-old resident of East Jerusalem.
\nTwo Israelis were killed. The police said one was a member of its counterterror unit, Yosef Kirma, 29. The second was identified as Levana Malihi, 60.
\nThe assailant, who could not be named because of a court order, was supposed to report to an Israeli jail on Sunday morning to serve a four-month term for assaulting a police officer in 2013, according to Israeli and Palestinian news reports. He had been jailed in the past for security offenses and incitement to violence, the reports said. A day before the shooting, he told Maan, an independent Palestinian news agency, that he intended to report to prison in Ramla, a city in central Israel, at 10 a.m. on Sunday. Instead, he apparently headed to the area around the police headquarters in Jerusalem.
\nThe Magen David Adom Israeli ambulance service got the first call about the shootings at 10:12 a.m. In addition to the two people who were killed, it said, three others were wounded by gunshots and two women were slightly injured when their vehicle was hit by the assailant\u2019s car as he tried to flee. Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Palestinian coastal territory of Gaza, praised the attack and described the gunman as \u201cone of ours.\u201d
\nThe Hamas-affiliated Al Quds television station broadcast a video that it said was exclusive to the channel and that it described as the perpetrator\u2019s last words. It was not clear when or where the video was filmed. In it, the man, dressed in a green polo shirt, the color of Islam and of Hamas\u2019s flag, stood before a map of historic Palestine. He said he was sending \u201ca message to the people of Jerusalem and the youth of Jerusalem to keep resisting for Al Aqsa holy mosque,\u201d the contested Jerusalem holy site also known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount, a focus of tensions and unrest in recent years.
\nThe episode was the latest in a pattern of such attacks in an area that has been the site of numerous stabbing, car ramming and shooting assaults over the last year. At first, a witness said, the gunfire blended in with the hacking sound of road work, but passers-by soon started running in panic. The police released a photograph of the gunman\u2019s car, a white sedan pockmarked with bullet holes.
\nPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised what he described as the \u201cswift and determined action\u201d of the police.
\nThe Israeli police chief, Roni Alsheich, said that because of the heavy police deployment in the area, the entire event was over within three or four minutes.
\nIsraeli security officials had forecast a new wave of violence around the period of the Jewish High Holy Days and coinciding with the first anniversary of the outbreak of Palestinian stabbings, shootings and car attacks. Most of these crimes have been committed by so-called lone wolves \u2014 Palestinians acting without the assistance of known Palestinian organizations and, in many cases, without any particular political affiliation.
\nThe attacks had waned in recent months but surged, as if on cue, after the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha and in the prelude to the Jewish holidays, which began a week ago. In the last two weeks of September, the Israeli authorities reported about six stabbings or attempted stabbings and one car ramming, mostly in the West Bank, in which eight Israeli soldiers and border police officers were injured. Five assailants were killed, among them a Jordanian visitor who was caught on security cameras lunging toward Israeli police officers with a knife at the Damascus Gate, one of the busiest entrances to the Old City in East Jerusalem.
\nIsraeli officials have said that this time, the attackers found the Israeli security forces better prepared to respond.
\nGilad Erdan, the public security minister, urged Israeli Jews on Sunday to continue to come to Jerusalem to perform the rituals traditionally performed at this time in the Hebrew calendar. A large gathering was expected at the Western Wall, a Jewish holy site in the Old City, on Monday night, with the chief rabbis of Israel scheduled to be in attendance. Mr. Erdan called on people to come and \u201cshow the accursed terrorists that they will not beat us.\u201d
\nSince Oct. 1, 2015, about 40 Israelis and others, including two American visitors, have been killed as a result of the attacks. More than 230 Palestinians have been killed during the same period, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health \u2014 the majority of them while carrying out or attempting to carry out attacks, by Israel\u2019s count.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JERUSALEM: A Palestinian gunman made a brazen choice of location for a deadly rampage on Sunday: Driving a speeding car, he opened fire at civilians near a light rail stop opposite Israel\u2019s national police headquarters, on the main road that runs between West Jerusalem and the predominantly Palestinian eastern part of the city. He then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n