Two bomb attacks at Jerusalem bus stops left at least one dead and 15 injured on Wednesday, a modus operandi that had not been used in years in the Holy City.
A first explosion at a bus stop outside Jerusalem injured 12, four of them seriously, and a second at another station demolished a bus and injured three, according to rescue workers. The Israeli police described these two explosions as “attacks” and later told AFP that one person had succumbed to their injuries.
According to an AFP photographer present at the scene of the first explosion, the explosion pierced a metal fence behind the bus stop, with an electric scooter and a hat lying on the ground.
“We heard a loud explosion. We immediately rushed to the scene in large numbers […] and saw two seriously injured people, a 16-year-old at a bus stop and a 45-year-old on a sidewalk nearby,” said Moshe Tobolsky, a rescue worker.
While police and rescue workers were on the scene, another explosion was heard a short distance away, according to the AFP photographer.
“Different explosive charges were placed in the two places. We suspect it was a combined attack,” Israel Police said in a statement. A security source told AFP that the bombs had been activated remotely.
The Shin Beth, the Israeli internal security services, told AFP that the last bomb attack in Jerusalem, a disputed city at the heart of recurring tensions, dates back to 2016.
“Terrorism”
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid is due to hold an emergency meeting with the heads of the security services at midday at the army headquarters in Tel Aviv and will inform his designated successor Benjamin Netanyahu, winner of the legislative elections of 1er November, of the security situation.
The most enduring of Israeli prime ministers, in power from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to 2021, Mr. Netanyahu is currently conducting talks with his allies from the ultra-Orthodox parties and the far right on the composition of the future government.
“We must form the government as soon as possible because terrorism does not wait,” said Wednesday Itamar Ben Gvir, a tenor of the far right who is eyeing the Ministry of Public Security, calling on the authorities to carry out “targeted killings” of suspected terrorists.
Without claiming responsibility for the attacks in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, “welcomed” them, considering them in a statement as “the price of crimes and aggressions” by Israel “against our people”. .
Kidnapping in the West Bank
In the wake of deadly attacks in Israel last March and April and other attacks that followed, the Israeli army carried out more than 2,000 raids in the West Bank. These raids, and the clashes that are sometimes associated with them, have killed more than 125 Palestinians, the heaviest toll in seven years, according to the UN.
Overnight, a Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces during clashes in Nablus, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Separately, the Israeli army said earlier on Wednesday that the remains of an 18-year-old Israeli civilian, a member of the Druze minority who died on Tuesday of a “serious road accident in the occupied West Bank, had been “removed in the hospital of Jenin, stronghold of armed factions in the north of this territory, where his death had been pronounced according to the soldiers.
“He was still alive, I saw him breathing, they (armed men) disconnected him from the machine to kidnap him,” Hossam Faro, the young man’s father, told Ynet radio. “I ask everyone to bring my son back to me,” he implored.
The kidnapping was not immediately claimed, but local sources told AFP that Palestinian fighters in a nearby refugee camp were in possession of the body.
The abductions of Israelis, dead or alive, have already been used in the past as bargaining chips by armed groups in order to demand the release of prisoners or the return of the bodies of Palestinians killed in clashes and kept by Israel. On Wednesday, the Israeli army cordoned off crossings around Jenin.