Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on November 19, 2014

Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed five people in a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday before being shot dead by police, the deadliest such incident in six years in the holy city.

Three of the victims held dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship and a fourth man was a British-Israeli national, police said.

A police officer who responded to the scene was shot and later died of his wounds.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of inciting violence in the city and said the killings, along with a spate of recent attacks, were part of a "battle over Jerusalem".

"As a nation we will settle the score with every terrorist and their dispatchers, and we have proved we will do so, but no one may take the law into their own hands, even if spirits are riled and blood is boiling," Netanyahu said in broadcast remarks.

Abbas condemned the attack, which came after weeks of unrest fueled in part by a dispute over Jerusalem's holiest site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary - containing the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest in Islam - and to Jews as the Temple Mount because the two Biblical temples once stood there.

A worshipper in the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jewish West Jerusalem said about 25 people were praying in a service when shooting broke out.

"I looked up and saw someone shooting people at point-blank range. Then someone came in with what looked like a butcher's knife and he went wild," Yosef Posternak told Israel Radio.

Photos distributed by Israeli authorities showed a man in a prayer shawl lying dead, a bloodied butcher's cleaver on the floor and prayer books covered in blood.

OBAMA CONDEMNS ATTACK

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3 Americans among dead in attack on Jerusalem synagogue

Category: Synagogue
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