JERUSALEM – Israeli police on Thursday handed home demolition notices to families of two more attackers from east Jerusalem, a Palestinian official said, a day after security personnel destroyed a home there for the first time in five years.
The destructions are a renewed tactic meant as a punitive measure for a wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis, including a deadly assault on a Jerusalem synagogue this week. Although the tactic has caused much controversy and debate over its effectiveness, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up the demolition orders in an effort to halt the violence.
Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian Authority minister for Jerusalem affairs, said the families of Ibrahim al-Akari and Moataz Hijazi received the notices on Thursday. An Israeli police spokesman said he was checking the report.
Al-Akari was shot dead by security forces after killing two Israelis earlier this month, when he rammed his car into a Jerusalem light rail station. Israeli police also killed Hijazi after he shot and seriously wounded an Israeli activist who has lobbied for greater Jewish access to a sensitive Jerusalem holy site in October.
Netanyahu has called for tough action amid a wave of attacks against Israelis. Eleven people have died in five separate incidents in recent weeks — most of them in Jerusalem, but also in Tel Aviv and the occupied West Bank. At least five Palestinians involved in the attacks were killed.
The attacks reached a new turning point on Tuesday when two Palestinian assailants burst into a crowded synagogue during morning prayers, killing four worshippers and a Druze Arab policeman with meat cleavers and gunfire. It was the deadliest attack in the city since 2008.
The violence has taken place against the background of roiling tensions over access to Jerusalem’s most holy site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The Palestinians fear that Israel wants to allow Jews to pray there, breaking a status quo in effect since Israel captured the area in the 1967 Mideast War.
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have repeatedly denied the claim but nationalistic politicians have increasingly stirred tensions by visiting the site.
The tensions have spurred anti-Arab demonstrations by Israeli hardliners. On Wednesday, Mayor Itamar Shimoni of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon suspended Israeli Arab labourers from work. They were renovating bomb shelters at local day-care centres.
The move drew widespread criticism on Thursday, including from Netanyahu who said “there is no place for discrimination against Israeli Arabs.” Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, who anchors the far right wing of Netanyahu’s coalition, insisted that “99 per cent of Israeli Arabs are completely loyal” to Israel.
Arab citizens make up about 20 per cent of Israel’s population of 8 million people. Tensions over the Jerusalem holy site have spilled into their community as well. Against this backdrop, Israeli police recently shot to death an Arab Israeli man who approached a police car wielding a knife.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said Thursday that militants in the Gaza Strip test-fired rockets into the Mediterranean Sea, in an apparent attempt to show off their capabilities.
Four rockets were fired in the past 24 hours, the military said, without elaborating on the test or type of rockets fired. There was no immediate confirmation from Palestinian officials in Gaza.
Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers fought a 50-day war over the summer that claimed more than 2,100 Palestinian and 70 Israeli lives.
At the time, Israel said it launched the operation to halt Hamas’ rocket attacks from Gaza — rockets that now have the ability to reach Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. And though the rocket fire continued throughout the war, it was largely neutralized by Israel’s “Iron Dome” aerial defence system.
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