Palestinians Attack With Rockets, Guns and Axe

Photo Credit: Flash 90

Soldiers shot an axe-wielding Palestinian man at an army roadblock outside Kalandiya, in the West Bank, on Sunday morning. When the man pulled the weapon from his bag and started advancing toward the soldiers, they ordered him to stop and drop the axe. When he didn’t, they shot him in the leg. The man was taken to hospital in Jerusalem for treatment.
A similar attack took place the night before, when a Palestinian teen stabbed a border policeman at a roadblock north of Jerusalem and ran away.
On Saturday morning, two terrorists who had launched a rocket at Israel from Rafiah, in the southern Gaza Strip, were killed seconds later when an Israeli jet fired on them. The Popular Resistance Committees claimed responsibility for the rocket launching squad.
It was the fourth attack from Gaza in three days – a sharp rise in violence after a three-month lull in fighting – that included more rockets and an infiltration attempt at the border with Israel.
In another attack on Saturday, in the West Bank, gunmen fired on an army convoy during a routine patrol near Ramallah. Soldiers were unharmed, but were also unable to apprehend their assailants, the IDF Spokesman’s Office said.
Inside Ramallah, earlier on Saturday, hundreds of Palestinian youths marched to protest indirect peace talks between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators that have been taking place in Jordan. The talks, held in Amman over the past three weeks, have brought little hope for a major breakthrough in the stalled negotiations between the two sides.
A day before, in Gaza, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh publicly urged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to end the talks immediately. “No Palestinian should shake the hand of his enemy or of the occupier,” Haniyeh said, protesting Israel’s arrest of PA Parliamentary Speaker Aziz Dweik and another Hamas-affiliated member of Parliament on suspicion of terrorist activity.