Palestinian stabs 4 in southern Israel

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — A Palestinian assailant stabbed and wounded four Israelis in the southern town of Kiryat Gat on Saturday, police said, shortly after the United States announced its top diplomat would travel to the region to try to ease tensions.

A senior US official in Washington said Secretary of State John Kerry will meet next week with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to try to stop ongoing violence, although he insisted it was not a renewed effort to broker a peace accord.

One Israeli suffered serious wounds and three others, including a 13-yearold girl, were in moderate condition, a hospital official said.

The Palestinian suspect, from a village near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, was apprehended in the garden of a nearby house after security forces mounted a search. A police spokeswoman said he was found with a bloodstained knife and bloodied hands.

An Israeli Bedouin Arab, whom some local residents mistook for the assailant, was lightly injured after being set upon briefly. He was also taken to the hospital for treatment, police said. It underlined increased Jewish- Arab tensions as a result of the recent attacks in Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Eighteen Israelis and others have died, along with 80 Palestinians, in a wave of violence over the past seven weeks.

Palestinian allegations that Israel was trying to alter the religious status quo at a Jerusalem holy site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where al-Aqsa mosque stands, and to Jews as Temple Mount, have partly fueled the violence.

Non-Muslim prayer is banned around al-Aqsa and Israel has said it will not change that. But more visits in recent years by Jewish religious activists and ultra-nationalist Israeli politicians to the complex, where two biblical temples once stood, have done little to convince the Palestinians.