Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed four people in a Jerusalem synagogue yesterday before being shot dead by police, the deadliest such incident in six years in the holy city amid a surge in religious conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to respond with a “heavy hand,” and again accused Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of inciting violence in Jerusalem.
Abbas condemned the attack, which comes after a month of unrest fuelled in part by a dispute over Jerusalem’s holiest shrine.
A worshipper at the morning service in the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood of West Jerusalem said about 25 people were praying when shooting broke out.
“I looked up and saw someone shooting people at point-blank range. Then someone came in with what looked like a butcher’s knife and he went wild,” the witness, Yosef Posternak, told Israel Radio.
Photos distributed by Israeli authorities showed a man in a Jewish prayer shawl lying dead, a bloodied butcher’s cleaver on the floor, several overturned prayer tables and prayer books covered in blood. Israel’s ambulance service said at least eight people were seriously wounded.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) said it carried out the attack. “We declare full responsibility of the PFLP for the execution of this heroic operation conducted by our heroes this morning in Jerusalem,” said Hani Thawbta, a PFLP leader in Gaza.
Police identified one of the dead as Rabbi Moshe Twersky, who taught at a Jerusalem seminary. Twersky was from a Hassidic rabbinical dynasty and a grandson of Joseph Soloveitchik, a renowned Boston rabbi who died in 1993.
In a statement, Abbas said: “The presidency condemns the attack on Jewish worshippers in one of their places of prayer in West Jerusalem and condemns the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it.”