JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A Palestinian stabbed an Israeli outside Jerusalem’s walled Old City on Saturday before he was shot and killed by security forces at the scene, Israeli and Palestinian sources said.
A video released by Israeli police appears to show a man crossing a street and then turning around and several times stabbing or attempting to stab an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who had been walking a few steps behind him. The assailant then runs toward an Israeli border policeman and is shot several times by him and another officer as he falls to the ground.
Another video circulating on social media appears to show one of the officers shooting at the assailant twice after he was already lying on the ground. Reuters could not independently verify the footage and a spokesperson for the police did not immediately comment on it.
The Israeli stabbed was moderately wounded, said a spokesperson for Israel’s ambulance service.
Palestinian officials condemned the killing of the alleged assailant. Lawmaker Dimitri Deliani described it in a written statement as “the execution of a Palestinian young man in cold blood.”
Israel’s border police chief said he fully backed the officers whose response “resulted in the neutralization of the terrorist and prevented him from further harming fighters and civilians at the scene.”
Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israelis, many carried out by assailants with no known affiliation to militant groups, have occurred sporadically since 2015, a year after Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed.
(Reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Christina Fincher)
