A gunman fired, wounding two Israelis, not far from the tomb of Simon the Just, a place of pilgrimage for ultra-Orthodox Jews, in Jerusalem, Israeli police announced on Tuesday April 18. Since then, police and border guards have been conducting a manhunt for the shooter in what Israeli police suspect was a "terrorist attack". Police said they found a "Carlo" submachine gun, a clandestinely manufactured submachine gun used by the assailant.
The Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, added that the injured, two men, continued to drive after the attack that targeted their car shortly before 7:10 a.m. (6:10 a.m. in Paris) in the neighborhood. of Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, and had reported it to the police, before being taken care of by the emergency services.
The neighborhood was cordoned off and large numbers of heavily armed law enforcement personnel were deployed there.
The shootings took place near a Jewish shrine: Sheikh Jarrah was at the heart of tensions in 2021 between Israeli residents and settlers trying to gain ground there. These tensions had contributed to the outbreak of the May 2021 war between Israel and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip.
Renewed violence since the beginning of the year
The attack comes as Israel commemorates the Holocaust and against the backdrop of a return to Israeli-Palestinian violence since the beginning of the year after the entry into office, at the end of December, of one of the most on the right of Israel's history, led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Since the beginning of the year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of at least 96 Palestinians, 19 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian, according to an Agence France-Presse count compiled from official Israeli sources and Palestinians.
These numbers include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, including minors; on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, including minors, and three members of the Arab minority.
