AFP
Two people including a child were killed Friday in car ramming attack on a bus stop in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, Israeli authorities said.
The attack comes amid spiralling violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this year.
“As a result of the ramming, there are two dead and another five injured,” an Israeli police statement said.
“The suspect was neutralised on the spot” in Ramot, a Jewish settlement in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, the Israeli police said, describing it as a “terror” attack.
Police forces including an off-duty officer “arrived quickly at the scene, and fired at the terrorist who was neutralised on the spot,” police added in a separate statement.
Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek hospital said those who died were eight and 20 years old.
An AFP journalist at the scene saw a blue car that had crashed into a bus stop. A pink children’s doll was among debris nearby.
A helicopter circled the scene overhead.
Late last month, an attack killed six Israelis and a Ukrainian outside a synagogue in annexed east Jerusalem, a day after the deadliest Israeli army raid in years in the occupied West Bank claimed 10 lives.
The synagogue attack on the Jewish Sabbath was the deadliest targeting Israeli civilians in more than a decade.
Dozens of onlookers gathered at the scene of Friday’s attack, many of them ultra-Orthodox Jews dressed in black and white clothes.
Nehurai Dery, who was on his way to visit his father in Ramot, told AFP: “It’s crazy what’s happening.”
“The government should (find) a solution,” said Dery, who runs a construction company.
“But the government doesn’t want a solution. The government here, the government in Gaza, in Ramallah, they want the division.”
Friday’s car-ramming followed a week of violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
On Thursday, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian near the West Bank city of Hebron, the Palestinian health ministry said, after what the army called a “stabbing attack”.
On Tuesday, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager in the city of Nablus, according to the Palestinian health ministry, with the Israeli army saying he had fired on soldiers.
A day earlier, Israeli forces killed five suspected Palestinian gunmen in a raid in Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, after a days-long search for suspects in a shooting in a restaurant near the city.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen at least 43 Palestinians — including attackers, militants and civilians, killed this year.
Eight Israeli civilians, including two children, and one Ukrainian have been killed over the same period, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel and the West Bank last month in a trip focused on urging calm amid an escalation of violence.
During talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Blinken urged both sides to prevent further bloodshed.
Last year was the deadliest year in the West Bank since the United Nations started tracking fatalities in the territory in 2005.
In November, two people were killed and 13 wounded in bombings at two Jerusalem bus stops.
Israel captured Jerusalem’s eastern sector in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move not recognised internationally.
