Israel arrests 51 Palestinians in East Jerusalem raid
JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY: Israeli police raided a Palestinian neighborhood in annexed East Jerusalem overnight and arrested 51 people accused of violent protests against security forces, authorities said Monday.
The 51 Palestinian suspects from Issawiya were arrested for participating in recent “riots and terror-related incidents,” including throwing stones and firebombs at security forces, a police statement said.
Palestinian youths in parts of East Jerusalem regularly clash with Israeli security forces during protests against Israel’s occupation.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War. It later annexed East Jerusalem in a move never recognized by the international community.
Israel sees all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, while the Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
Police had raided Issawiya along with a number of other Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem three months ago, when tensions rose and clashes erupted after Israel placed metal detectors at the entrance to a Jerusalem holy site.
The metal detectors were put in place after a deadly shooting in which Arab Israeli gunmen emerged from the holy site and killed two police officers.
Since then, the situation in Issawiya and other Palestinian areas has largely been calm.
Palestinians missing
Three Palestinians went missing from a tunnel between Egypt and the Gaza Strip under mysterious circumstances on Monday, authorities in the Hamas-run territory said.
“Three Palestinian workers disappeared inside one of the tunnels on the Palestinian-Egyptian border and the security forces are investigating to locate their whereabouts,” the Interior Ministry in Gaza City said in a statement.
A number of Gazans have died in tunnel collapses in recent months, but there were no reports of any such incident on Monday.
One witness told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that a group of masked gunmen snatched the three and took them across the border into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The account of the witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was not confirmed by authorities.
Egyptian security forces have been fighting a branch of Daesh in the Sinai, and the extremists have recently stepped up their attacks.
In August, a suicide bomber killed a Hamas guard along Gaza’s border with Egypt in what was described as a rare terrorist attack against the Palestinian group.
In 2015, gunmen seized four Hamas members from a bus bound for Cairo from the Gaza Strip in the Sinai near the border. Egypt has cracked down on tunnels crossing from Gaza into the Sinai, and Hamas has agreed to improve security along the border.
Tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are typically used for smuggling. The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade for more than a decade, while Egypt has also kept its border with the Palestinian enclave largely closed in recent years.
Hamas and Israel have fought three wars since 2008.