Tension soars across E. Jerusalem
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E-mail Xinhua, November 6, 2014
A surveillance balloon was floating high and helicopters were roaring in the Wednesday sky in East Jerusalem, while police vehicles were deployed at main intersections and ever more police were patrolling the streets. Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem looked like a war zone.
Clashes erupted between Israeli police and Palestinians across East Jerusalem after a Palestinian rammed his vehicle into pedestrians at a light rail station in the area Wednesday noon, killing an Israeli police officer and wounding 13 others.
In the late afternoon, the air in Isawiya - an impoverished East Jerusalem Arab neighborhood just across from the upper-middle class Jewish French Hill neighborhood - was soaked with tear gas.
Hanni Sawi, an activist with Isawiya's local committee, told Xinhua that Israeli police sprayed the entire neighborhood with dozens of gas canisters after a group of Palestinian youths tried to approach them.
"It's a kind of collective punishment," Sawi said, holding in his hands two canisters which landed on his balcony.
The Sawi family huddled in a small windowless room of their home, trying to protect a one-year-old baby from breathing the gas.
In a phone interview with Xinhua, police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld denied Sawi's allegations, saying that no tear gas was used in the area as no riots took place there.
Not long after the interview, however, dozens of youths clashed with Israeli security forces in Isawiya. To contain the violence, the Jerusalem municipality placed large concrete blocks at three of the four entrances to the neighborhood, blocking the residents' immediate access to the Jewish parts of the city.
Isawiya is just one of the flashpoints in East Jerusalem. Fierce clashes were also reported in the neighborhood of Shuafat, from which the vehicular attacker came from, and in even usually-peaceful neighborhoods such as Beit Hanina and A-ram, with Palestinians using stones, fire bombs or fireworks to confront Israeli police.
Violent clashes also took place Wednesday at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as "Noble Sanctuary", where Jews are allowed to visit but not to pray.
The clashes erupted in the compound between stone-throwing Palestinians and security forces ahead of a visit by a group of far-right activists known as "Temple Mount loyalists". The activists intended to conduct a prayer vigil to mark a week since a Palestinian shot Yehuda Glick, a leader of the group. Palestinians consider such visits as a provocation and frequently respond to it with violence.
Over the past week, several Israeli parliament members and ministers called for a mass march to the Temple Mount, with hawkish cabinet minister Uri Ariel vowing at a rally in Jerusalem that "the status quo on the Temple Mount will be changed."
Wednesday's car attack, the second of its kind in two weeks, took place at a time of heightening tensions between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem. The motorist was shot dead on the scene by police.
Last week, a baby and a woman were killed when a Palestinian crashed his car into a light rail station in Jerusalem, in another politically motivated murder. The driver was later shot by police and died of his wounds at hospital.
Tensions have been gripping the city since July, when a 16-year-old Palestinian youth was kidnapped and burned alive by Jewish extremists to avenge the earlier abduction and killing of three Jews in the West Bank.
Palestinians, on their part, say they feel under attack, with an ever increasing number of racist incidents across the city.
"Racist attacks became a daily experience," 19-year-old Muhammad Abu Rass, a cook in a central Jerusalem cafe, told Xinhua. "Usually these are mainly verbal insults by right-wing extremists, but sometimes it comes to physical attacks," he said.
The hostilities are at their worst since the Second Intifada, or (Palestinian) "uprising", erupted in 2000, giving a rise to fears for a "Third Intifada".
However, police spokesperson Rosenfeld dismissed the fears. "There is absolutely no Intifada," he told Xinhua.
Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it. The Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, while Israel maintains that Jerusalem is Israel's "undivided and eternal" capital.
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