On edge but faithful to their religious routine, worshippers yesterday returned to the Jerusalem synagogue where four rabbis and a policeman were killed in a Palestinian attack a day earlier.
The bloodstains had been washed away. But four memorial candles burned as about a dozen men chanted their daily prayers and police newly stationed outside guarded the Kehillat Bnei Torah congregation.
“It’s a little scary, but we’re going to have to go on with our lives. We’re staying here, we’re not moving anywhere. This terrorist attack is not going to change anything,” said Avraham Burkei, a member of the synagogue in Jewish West Jerusalem.
Palestinians in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem also voiced fears for their safety amid the surge in violence, as police set up checkpoints in their neighbourhoods and tethered surveillance balloons floated overhead. Pointing to armed police checking cars and pedestrians on a road leading to the town centre, Imram Abu al-Hawa, a 40-year-old Palestinian, spoke of humiliation and fear of reprisals.
Violence in Jerusalem and other areas of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories has surged since July, when a Palestinian teen was burned to death by Israeli assailants in alleged revenge for the abduction and killing of three Jewish teens by militants in the West Bank.
We’re staying here, we’re not moving anywhere
The collapse of US-brokered peace talks, renewed fighting in Gaza in the summer and continued, internationally condemned Israeli settlement-building on land Palestinians seek for a state have also fanned the flames. In a move likely to aggravate Palestinian anger, Israel yesterday approved the construction of 78 new homes in two settlements on West Bank land annexed to Jerusalem.
Growing security fears prompted the Israeli military to propose expanding the use of a “panic button” smartphone app that it is introducing next year to allow civilians to alert authorities about rocket strikes.
“The app could also include alerts for bombings, terrorist infiltrations and abductions,” the project manager, Lieutenant-Colonel Levi Itach of Homefront Command, said. Police would receive incident coordinates automatically, and by not requiring users to speak, the app would allow them to hide from would-be assailants.
Concealment helped some survive Tuesday’s synagogue attack, in which two pistol- and cleaver-wielding Palestinians hunted down worshippers before eventually being killed by police. The rabbis – three of them dual US-Israeli citizens and the fourth a British-Israeli national – died along with Druze policeman.
It was the bloodiest such incident in Jerusalem since 2008.