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A gunman has killed at least seven people near a synagogue in an Israeli settlement in occupied East Jerusalem before being fatally shot, in an escalation of violence following a deadly Israeli military raid in the West Bank a day earlier.
After Friday’s shooting, the Magen David Adom emergency service said it was treating 10 wounded, some in critical condition, reports Al Jazeera.
“What we understand happened was a car pulled up at the front of a synagogue, a gunman got out and opened fire,” Al Jazeera’s James Bays reported from the scene of the attack in the illegal Israeli settlement of Neve Yaakov.
“The figures we have now are seven people dead,” said Bays, adding that police said the suspect had no previous “security record”.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The emergency response agency reported a total of 10 gunshot victims, including a 70-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy.
TV footage showed several victims lying on the road outside the synagogue being tended to by emergency workers.
“I heard a lot of bullets,” Matanel Almalem, an 18-year-old student who lives near the synagogue, told the AFP news agency.
An earlier police statement said there was a “terror attack in a synagogue in Jerusalem” and that “the shooting terrorist was neutralised [killed]”. Police later said the suspect was a 21-year-old resident of East Jerusalem.
The attack comes a day after a deadly Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Nine Palestinians were killed, including an elderly woman, after dozens of Israeli soldiers attacked a house the army said contained suspected fighters, leading to several hours of intense confrontations.
A 22-year-old Palestinian man also was shot by Israeli forces in the town of al-Ram, north of Jerusalem, on Thursday.
Gaza fighters then fired rockets and Israel carried out air raids overnight, but the exchange was limited.
