Finding Ambushers Of Students Priority Jewish Seminarians Were Attacked In Muslim Sector Of Jerusalem

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his security chiefs Thursday to make their top priority finding the attackers of two Jewish seminary students who were shot in an ambush in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter.

Authorities suspected Palestinian militants were behind the early morning shooting, which killed one student and seriously wounded the other Thursday.

“We cannot accept .. an attack in the Old City, in the heart of the capital of Israel,” the prime minister said.

A spokesman for the Jewish seminary that the students attended suggested it would retaliate by pushing Jewish settlement in Arab east Jerusalem.

“The Arabs will pay for the attack for many years to come,” Ateret Cohanim spokesman Matti Dan promised.

The students were ambushed shortly after midnight Wednesday as they walked through a narrow alley in the Muslim Quarter on the way to their dormitory.

One or more gunmen crouching behind a low wall in the alley opened fire with Kalashnikov assault rifles, felling one student with a shot to the leg, police said.

The attackers shot 26-year-old Gabriel Hirschberg, a Hungarian immigrant, six more times as he lay on the ground, killing him.

Three more bullets hit the second student, who managed to run hundreds of feet to a group of Israeli border policeman guarding the home of Infrastructure Minister Ariel Sharon.

The student, seriously wounded, was hospitalized.

At one point, police said it appeared there been only one gunman, but said later there may have been more. While there was no claim of responsibility, Netanyahu said the shooters “appear to be professional killers.”

After an emergency Cabinet meeting on the attack, Netanyahu ordered a new police post and beefed-up patrols in the Old City.

Police stopped passers-by in the Muslim Quarter to check their identities, and detained several residents. Israel’s Channel 2 TV said police were also investigating whether members of the Palestinian police were involved.

Ateret Cohanim seminary - partially funded by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz - has been leading a campaign to settle Jews in Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, which Palestinians hope to one day see as the capital of a Palestinian state.

“Our enemies seem committed to carrying out” a holy war, Ateret Cohanim executive director Yossi Baumol said Thursday.

“If they know every terrorism act will be responded with by expanding the Jewish presence here maybe they would stop their attacks.”

Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, a senior member of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, demanded that Israel respond to the attack by suspending peace talks with the Palestinians, which had resumed only in September after months of crisis.

The Old City, a flashpoint of Israeli-Arab violence, lies in east Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast War and later annexed.