A Palestinian fatally stabbed two people in a Tel Aviv office building and three other people were killed in an attack in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Israeli police and the army said.In the latest attack near the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank, a police commander said a Palestinian drove along the shoulder of the main road and shot at crawling traffic, killing three people and wounding others.Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the attacker’s car stopped when it hit another vehicle and the driver was seized. He said an American citizen was one of three people killed. The others were a Palestinian and an Israeli. At least seven other people were wounded, a medical source said. The attack brought to 18 the number of Israelis and others who have died, along with 80 Palestinians, in a wave of violence over the past seven weeks.The American was identified as Ezra Schwartz, 18, who was studying in Israel, according to a Facebook post by the American Jewish Committee. CBS’s Boston affiliate said Schwartz was from Sharon, Massachusetts. Over the past two months, in a wave of violent attacks, 18 Israelis and about 80 Palestinians have lost their lives. The conflict has partly stemmed out of an Israeli effort to try and alter the religious status quo by increasing Jewish worship rights at the religious complex of the Noble Sanctuary, known as Al-Aqsa Mosque to Muslims and Temple Mount to Jews. Non-Muslim prayer is restricted in and around the Noble Sanctuary. The recent increase in visits by high profile Jewish religious activists and Israeli politicians has sparked a series of turbulent hostilities resulting in vicious conflict. The violence has spread from Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to parts of the Hamas-ruled Gaza, with the deployment of over 2,000 Israeli police officers in Jerusalem alone. Despite the Israeli description of these recent attacks as the work of ‘lone wolf’ assailants, the authorities have been employing tougher measures to crush the Palestinian assault by demolishing housing settlements, administrating stiffer sentences and beefing up a more militarised presence in urban centres and other deadlocked areas.
The Palestinian people were displaced with the advent of the Israeli state in 1948. Thay have since been engaged in resistance against the brutal takeover of their land and their expulsion from their hearths and homes. Where the Oslo Accord in 1993 provided a two-state solution to usher in peace and neighbourly coexistence between the warring communities, sadly the Israeli state has made no concessions to achieve this fair exchange of ‘land for peace’. Instead it has exercised a blatant form of ‘settler colonialism’ by forcefully constructing housing settlements for Jewish citizens and migrants on occupied territory. With the decline of a Palestinian armed resistance and no hope of attaining a two-state solution, it is no surprise that the Palestinian people have clutched at this last desperate straw. Stabbing, shooting and stoning is a reflection of the pent up anger and frustration of several Palestinian generations over lack of statehood and their leaders’ failure to achieve peace in the face of unremitting Israeli intransigence, coupled with crumbling economic conditions, collective punishment and a steady spike in political and social persecution against them. The international community and the Arab states have not consistently stood by or in some cases have abandoned the cause of the Palestinian people’s pursuit of self-determination.
pk.shafaqna.com
