A terror attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood yesterday left five people – four rabbis and a Druze policeman – dead and several others injured Tuesday when two Palestinians entered during morning prayers armed with knives, meat cleavers, and a handgun and attacked worshipers inside. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in London, called the attack “an act of pure terror and senseless brutality and murder” that was “a pure result of incitement.” The attack had been praised by officials from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah.
Palestinian officials, up to and including President Mahmoud Abbas, have for weeks used Palestinian media, including PA-run news outlets and Fatah’s official Facebook page, to make inflammatory remarks about Jews and Israelis. Abbas issued a condemnation following Tuesday’s attack but was blasted by Israeli officials for weeks of incitement that they claimed have led to a string of attacks against Israelis, including last week’s murder of a soldier at a Tel Aviv train station and the attempted assassination of an Israeli activist in Jerusalem in October.
Following the Tuesday attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted Palestinian officials for “daily, hourly incitement” against Israel. Netanyahu had, following comments made by Abbas last month, warned that continued Palestinian incitement regarding Jerusalem risked provoking even more violence. In Kerry’s statement Tuesday, he called on Palestinian leadership to “begin to take serious steps to restrain any kind of incitement that comes from their language.”
Tuesday’s attack, which The New York Times noted was the worst attack in Jerusalem in six years, brought the number of people with American citizenship killed in the latest wave of Palestinian violence to four – the State Department confirmed hours after the attack that three of the victims were United States citizens – following the murder last month of a three-month-old baby, leading CNN reporter Jake Tapper to tweet that “More people with American citizenship have been killed by Palestinian terrorists in the last year than have been killed by ISIS.”
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