BNEI BRAK, Israel – Israeli security forces strengthened their presence across the country and the occupied territories on Wednesday morning, the morning after a Palestinian gunman killed five people in the fifth attack in less than two weeks.
The recent spate of violence and fears of further attacks prompted the military to send reinforcements to the occupied West Bank, where the gunman behind Tuesday night’s attack lived. Troops also deployed along the Israel-Gaza border. Police said they focused almost exclusively on counter-terrorism operations as they scaled up their street presence.
The attack came on the eve of Land Day, an annual Palestinian commemoration of Arab protests in 1976 against attempts by the state to expropriate private Palestinian land in northern Israel. Those protests helped catalyze Palestinian national consciousness.
“After a period of calm, there is a violent outburst from those who want to destroy us, those who want to hurt us at any cost, whose hatred of the Jews, of the State of Israel is driving them mad,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said. said in a video that he recorded himself because he is currently infected with the coronavirus and is in isolation. “They are willing to die – so that we will not live in peace.”
Although responsibility was not immediately claimed, several Palestinian militant groups praised the attack, including an official from Hamas, the militant group that leads the Gaza Strip. He said the attack was in response to a landmark diplomatic summit Monday in southern Israel, where foreign ministers from four Arab countries met for the first time on Israeli soil, a meeting that bolstered Israel’s regional legitimacy to the dismay of Israel. the Palestinians.
But Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas broke from his usual habit of silence following terror attacks in Israel and condemned the shooting, as did a prominent Arab-Israeli politician.
The attack was the latest in a wave of violence that killed 11 people in Israel, making March one of the deadliest months in Israel, outside of a large-scale war, in several years.
In recent weeks, officials have repeatedly expressed concern that violence will escalate once the Islamic holy month of Ramadan begins, which begins later this week. Ramadan is often a time of heightened tension between Palestinians and Israelis, and Ramadan-related disputes helped stoke the tensions that led to an 11-day war in Gaza last year.
Ramadan was already expected to be more tense this year than usual as it will coincide with Passover and Easter – a rare event that is expected to lead to more Muslims, Jews and Christians gathering at shared religious sites in Jerusalem.
Videos circulating on social media on Wednesday showed a heavy Israeli military presence in the shooter’s home village near the West Bank city of Jenin. Some Jewish settlements in the West Bank closed their gates to Palestinian workers, Israel’s public broadcaster Kan said. But as usual, tens of thousands of Palestinian workers were allowed to leave the West Bank for day labor in Israel, Kan reported.
Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 and has occupied it ever since. The Israeli military has a strong military presence there, partly to maintain control of the area and partly to protect the hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers who have moved to the West Bank since 1967. percent of the territory under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
More than 80 Palestinians were killed by soldiers and settlers in the West Bank last year, according to the United Nations, and at least 15 so far in 2022.
Most of the victims of the recent attacks were Israeli Jews, but some were also members of Israel’s Arab minority, and at least two had foreign passports.
Details emerged about the victims of the attack, whose funerals began Wednesday morning. One was identified as Avishai Yechezkel, a 29-year-old teacher and rabbi, who was killed while walking near his apartment in Bnei Brak, the religious town in central Israel where the attack took place, according to an Israeli news channel.
A second victim, Amir Khoury, 32, was an Arab-Israeli police officer who died in hospital after a shootout in which he helped kill the attacker, police said. Mr. Khoury rode a motorcycle to the gunman so that his partner, who was sitting behind him, could shoot at the attacker.
A third victim was identified as Yaakov Shalom, a 36-year-old resident of Bnei Brak, and the other two were Ukrainian citizens, the Ukrainian embassy said Wednesday morning. It was not immediately clear whether these were recently arrived war refugees or people with dual nationalities from Israel and Ukraine.
Among the Palestinian militant groups touting the attack was the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is loosely affiliated with Fatah, the secular party led by Palestinian Authority president Mr Abbas.
Tuesday’s attack followed another unusually brutal attack in northern Israel on Sunday evening, when two Islamic State supporters killed two police officers, one of whom was a member of Israel’s Arab Druze minority.
That attack came less than a week after another in southern Israel, in which a Bedouin extremist stabbed three people and killed a fourth in a car rattling.
Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli politician who leads the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli government, condemned the attack.
“We are all facing a murderous wave of terror together,” he said. Terrorists, he added, make no distinction between Arabs and Jews.
In the Israeli media on Wednesday morning, reactions ranged from demands for a decisive security response to calls for calm, amid fears that drastic action could further aggravate the situation.
“The ball is now in Israel’s court,” wrote Alex Fishman, military affairs correspondent for Yedioth Ahronot, a major centrist newspaper. “Every wrong move, every emotional and hasty decision, can send us back to the dark days of countless suicide attacks on Israeli soil.”
Irit Pazner Garshowitz reported on Tzur Hadassah, Israel, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel. Reporting was contributed by Gabby Sobelman in Bnei Brak, Israel.