JERUSALEM (Reuters) – One Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces, Palestinian health officials said, after committing a shooting attack that wounded five Israelis outside a shopping mall in the settlement of Ma’ ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday.
Israeli emergency services said one of the five Israelis was in a serious condition.
“We went into the restaurant where we saw the victim lying fully conscious with gunshot wounds to his upper body,” Israeli paramedic Oren Brill said. “We provided him with life-saving treatment and rapidly evacuated him to hospital in a serious condition. Following an initial assessment in the trauma room, he was transferred to the operating room.”
Footage circulating on social media, which could not be independently verified by Reuters, shows the shooter motionless on the ground, wearing a bright yellow vest, while blood seeps onto the sidewalk beneath his body.
The Hamas militant organisation, which governs the Gaza Strip, said the attack was a response to Israeli officials ascending to Temple Mount in Jerusalem last week.
The legal status of the religious site, known to Judaism as Temple Mount and in Islam as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, is a recurring flashpoint in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Israel’s Channel 12 said the shooter was shot by an off-duty officer.
Violence in the West Bank, among territories where the Palestinians seek to establish a state, has worsened over the past 15 months amid stepped-up Israeli raids, Palestinian street attacks and assaults by Jewish settlers on Palestinian villages.
(Reporting by Emily Rose and Nidal Al-Mughrabi; Editing by Alex Richardson)
