The clashes continue to worsen in Israel, a few days after the violent intervention of the police on the esplanade of the Mosques. The European Union condemned this Saturday in a press release the two deadly attacks in Israel and the West Bank as well as the rocket attacks from Lebanon, calling for “restraint”. “The EU expresses its total condemnation of these acts of violence”, declared the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell. “We urge all parties to exercise maximum restraint,” he added.
Friday evening, an Italian tourist was killed on the Tel Aviv seafront and seven other people, aged between 17 and 74, injured in a car bombing. Police said the 45-year-old driver who was shot was from the Arab town of Kfar Kassem in central Israel. Three people are still being treated at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv for minor injuries, the facility said on Saturday.
The Israeli reserve mobilized
Earlier Friday, two sisters from the Israeli settlement of Efrat, aged 16 and 20, were killed and their mother seriously injured in an attack in the West Bank. The two sisters, of Israeli and British nationalities, were victims of Palestinian fire on their vehicle in the northeast of this Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
Following the attack in Tel Aviv, which occurred on a Sabbath evening and during the week of Passover, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “ordered the Israeli police to mobilize all the reserve units of the border police, and [l’armée] to mobilize additional forces to deal with terrorist attacks,” according to his office. Police said four reserve Border Police battalions would be deployed starting Sunday in city centers, in addition to units already mobilized in the mixed city of Lod and the Jerusalem area.
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas claimed that the attack in Tel Aviv was a “natural and legitimate response” to the Israeli “aggression” in the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The current outbreak of fever indeed follows violence which occurred on Wednesday on the esplanade of the Mosques, the third holiest site in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism, also the epicenter of tensions in the Holy City. The Israeli forces brutally burst inside the Al-Aqsa mosque to dislodge the faithful, in the middle of Ramadan, arousing numerous condemnations, local and international.