Death toll climbs to five in Israel synagogue attack
JERUSALEM – Israel vowed a harsh response after two Palestinian attackers slashed and shot to death four rabbis who were praying in a Jerusalem synagogue early Tuesday – an attack that horrified Israelis, drew international condemnation and threatened to further inflame Jewish-Muslim tensions that were already running high over a contested holy site.
Israeli media later reported that a police officer injured while responding to the assault had died.
At least seven Israelis were hospitalized in the wake of the attack, the deadliest in Jerusalem since 2008. The two attackers, shot dead by police units that converged on the scene within minutes, were identified as Palestinian cousins from predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, which has been a flashpoint for attacks in recent months.
The attackers – armed with cleavers and handguns and said to have been shouting “God is great!” – burst into the synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof during morning prayers, witnesses said. Many devoutly religious immigrants to Israel have settled in the area, and three of the four rabbis killed held American citizenship, the State Department said. A fourth was a Briton, according to Israeli officials.
The White House identified the slain Americans as Aryeh Kupinsky, Cary William Levine and Moshe Twersky. The statement did not provide hometowns.
Witnesses described panic and pandemonium during the attack, with the dead and wounded crumpling to the floor, clutching bloodied sacred texts. Those who managed to make their way out of the house of prayer burst onto the street screaming for help.
For many Israelis, the specter of a calculated attack on Jews at prayer, in ritual garments, carried chilling overtones of historic persecution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called top security officials to an emergency meeting, declared that the “despicable murderers” – he also called them “animals” – would not go unpunished. Within hours of the attack, a massive police contingent raided the family homes of the two assailants, identified as Udai Abu Jamal and Ghassan Abu Jamal, and Netanyahu later said the homes would be demolished and “inciters” held to account.
The two attackers “have no previous security records and did not operate within the framework of any organization,” the head of the domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet, Yoram Cohen, told members of a Knesset committee after the incident, the Haaretz newspaper reported.
A government statement said unspecified “additional decisions have been made in order to strengthen security throughout the country.” Israel had already redeployed hundreds of troops to the West Bank after a pair of lethal stabbing attacks last week.
In the wake of the latest attack, Israeli forces in East Jerusalem and several parts of the West Bank battled stone-throwing protesters, clashes that continued as night fell. A light-rail train passing through an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem was pelted with rocks, forcing it out of service.
At U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s prompting, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a denunciation of the attack but coupled it with a call for a halt to Israeli “intrusions” on a site in the walled Old City revered by both Jews and Muslims.
The militant Hamas movement, while not claiming any involvement, praised the attack.