JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli security forces shot dead a teenage assailant who stabbed and wounded two police officers in Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday, Israeli police said.
The officers suffered minor injuries during the attack by a 16-year-old east Jerusalem resident near a Jewish religious school, the police said.
Emergency responders said the attack took place in the Muslim quarter and that the wounded included a man and woman, who were taken to hospital.
A police statement said that the assailant was “neutralised”, and a police spokesman confirmed to AFP that the attacker had been killed.
Clashes broke out in the evening between Palestinians and Israeli police in the Issawiya neighbourhood where the young attacker was from, an AFP photographer said.
Several people were arrested and questioned on suspicion of being linked to the assailant, a police statement said.
The Old City is in the Israeli-annexed eastern part of Jerusalem, which Palestinians claims as the capital of their future state.
The attack took place near a yeshiva, or Jewish religious school, linked to the Ateret Cohanim organisation, a well-funded settler organisation, which states its mission is making “Jewish life flourish in Jerusalem.”
Lone-wolf attacks targeting Israeli security forces are common in the Old City.
The most recent occurred in late September, when a woman tried to stab officers on a street that leads to the Al-Aqsa mosque before being shot dead.
Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, in a move not recognised by most of the international community.
© Agence France-Presse