Palestinian boy, 13, wounds father and son in shooting one day after Jerusalem synagogue attack

A 13-year-old Palestinian boy left an Israeli father and son injured today after opening fire in a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.

It came just one day after another assailant killed seven people outside a synagogue at the start of their sabbath, in the deadliest attack the city has seen since 2008.

The victims of Saturday’s attack, aged 47 and 23, were both fully conscious and in a moderate to serious condition in hospital, medics added.

As police rushed to the scene in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, near East Jerusalem’s historic Old City, two passers-by with licensed weapons shot and overpowered the teen attacker.

Officers confiscated the boy’s gun and were shown in video footage escorting him to hospital. He was wearing nothing but underwear as he was taken on a stretcher with his hands cuffed behind his back.

“He waited to ambush civilians on the holy Sabbath day,” Israeli police spokesman Dean Elsdunne said, adding that the teenager opened fire on a group of five civilians.

Security footage showed the victims to be observant Jews, wearing skullcaps and tzitzit, or knotted ritual tassels.

Saturday’s attack — on the eve of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s arrival in the region —raises fears of a renewed cycle of violence, in one of the bloodiest months in Israel and the occupied West Bank in several years.

On Friday, a Palestinian gunman killed at least seven people, including a 70-year-old woman, in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem - an area captured by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in a move not internationally recognised.

This followed an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank on Thursday, during which eight Palestinian militants were reportedly killed along with a woman caught in the crossfire.

Militant group Hamas says the synagogue shooting was retaliation, however Israel says the raid was a pre-emptive assault to prevent a terrorist attack.

It prompted a rocket barrage from Gaza and retaliatory Israeli airstrikes, and although calm appeared to take hold after the limited exchange, tensions are still running high.

Thursday’s raid was the deadliest single incursion in the West Bank since 2002.

It follows a particularly bloody month in the territory that saw at least 30 Palestinians – militants and civilians – killed in confrontations with Israelis, according to a tally by the Associated Press.

The latest wave of violence poses a pivotal test for Israel’s new far-right government, after its firebrand national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, vowed to take even tougher action against Palestinians.

Israel said it had deployed another battalion to the West Bank on Saturday, adding hundreds more troops to a presence already on heightened alert in the occupied territory.

Footage showed Palestinians dancing and cheering in celebration of the shooting on Saturday, while detainees who celebrated Friday’s attack in prison were placed in solitary confinement, authorities said.

Security forces launched a crackdown in East Jerusalem, fanning out into the neighbourhood of the 21-year-old Palestinian gunman, who was shot and killed at the scene.

Police arrested 42 of his family members and neighbours for questioning in the At-Tur neighbourhood.

Israeli police called the attacker, who killed seven people near a synagogue, a terrorist - as Mark McQuillan reports

Last year, as the Israeli military intensified its arrest raids following a string of deadly Palestinian attacks within Israel, at least 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It was the highest annual death toll for more than a decade and a half. Thirty people were killed in Palestinian attacks against Israelis last year.

Israel says most of the dead were militants, but youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in the confrontations also have been killed.

The Israeli military contends its raids are meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart attacks, but Palestinians say they further entrench Israel’s 55-year, open-ended occupation of the West Bank.

The Palestinians demand East Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state, and much of the world considers it illegally occupied.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem hold permanent residency status, allowing them to work and move freely throughout Israel, but they are not allowed to vote in national elections.

Their residency rights can be stripped if they are found to live outside the city of an extended period, or in certain security cases.

Although their standard of living is generally better than in the West Bank and Gaza, the still receive a fraction of the services that Jewish residents do.

They also complain of home demolitions and the near impossibility of obtaining Israeli building permits.

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