Israel blocks off East Jerusalem
ISRAEL started setting up roadblocks in Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem and positioning soldiers in cities across the country yesterday to try to combat the worst surge of violence in months.
Palestinian officials condemned the security measures – the most serious clampdown in the Jerusalem area since a Palestinian uprising a decade ago – as collective punishment.
Israel’s security cabinet had authorised the crackdown hours earlier in an overnight session after Palestinians armed with knives and a gun had killed three Israelis and wounded several others on Tuesday.
Seven Israelis and 30 Palestinians, including children and assailants, have been killed in two weeks of bloodshed in Israel, Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
The violence has been partly triggered by Palestinians’ anger over what they see as increased Jewish encroachment on Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound, also revered by Jews as the site of two destroyed Jewish temples.
There is also deep-seated frustration with the failure of years of peace efforts to achieve Palestinian statehood and end Israeli settlementbuilding in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israeli paramilitary border police used their vehicles to block an exit at the edge of Jabel Mukabar, an East Jerusalem neighbourhood and home to three Palestinians who carried out deadly attacks against Israelis on Tuesday.
Policemen carried out body searches and examined the identity papers of Palestinian motorists. Cars were then allowed to leave. Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem carry the same identity papers as Israelis and, unlike their brethren in the West Bank, can travel throughout Israel.
Punishment
Dimitrii Delliani, an official in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, said closing entrances to Palestinian neighbourhoods was “collective punishment in violation of all international law”.
“(Israeli) cabinet decisions will not stop the intifada (uprising). People of resistance do not fear new security restrictions,” Hussam Badrawn, a spokesman for the militant Hamas group in the West Bank, said.
The government said the immediate aim was to stem stabbings and other attacks by Arab assailants, many of whom lived in eastern sectors.
One Israeli official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said Palestinian neighbourhoods would not be sealed off completely, describing the measure as “loose encirclement”.
Israel regards all Jerusalem, including the predominantly Arab east captured and annexed in 1967, as its “indivisible capital” – a claim that is not recognised internationally – and its right-wing government is wary of being portrayed as dividing the city.
At a Jerusalem bus stop where a Palestinian from Jabel Mukabar stabbed and killed an Israeli man on Tuesday before being shot dead, an Israeli woman sounded a defiant note.
“They want us to be afraid, so we have to do the opposite,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Jana.
Merchants in predominantly Jewish west Jerusalem reported a sharp drop-off in the number of shoppers.
At a late-night meeting of his security cabinet that finished in the early hours yesterday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also allowed revocation of residency rights of Palestinians deemed to have committed “terrorism”, as well as a step-up in the demolition of homes of people who carried out attacks. – Reuters
Jerusalem’s