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A teenage attacker injures 2 in Jerusalem, the day after a synagogue was attacked

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A 13-year-old boy opened fire and wounded two people in East Jerusalem on Saturday, just hours after a gunman killed seven outside a synagogue in the city’s deadliest attack since 2008, officials said.

Medics said that shooting in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, near the historic Old City, injured a father and his son, ages 47 and 23. Paramedics added that both were fully conscious and in moderate to serious condition in hospital.

Police said they shot and overpowered the 13-year-old attacker, injuring him. They said he was taken to hospital and there was no further news of his condition. A video clip showed the police escorting an injured young man, dressed only in underwear, away from the scene of the accident and on a stretcher.

The authorities sealed off the duct tape on the street, emergency vehicles and security forces swept through the area, while helicopters hovered overhead.

Saturday’s events – just a day before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the region – have raised the possibility of an even larger conflagration in one of the bloodiest months in Israel and the occupied West Bank in several years.

On Friday, a gunman killed at least seven people, including a 70-year-old woman, in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, an area Israel captured in 1967 and later annexed in a move not recognized internationally.

The Israeli military said it deployed another battalion to the West Bank on Saturday, adding hundreds more soldiers to its presence already on high alert in the occupied territories.

Prime Minister Benjamin said he would convene his security cabinet on Saturday evening, after the end of Shabbat, to discuss a further response to the attack near the synagogue. Security forces launched a crackdown at dawn on Saturday, spreading to the neighborhood of the 21-year-old gunman, who was shot dead at the scene. The police arrested 42 of his family members and neighbors for questioning in the Al-Tur neighborhood, east of Jerusalem.

The attack, which took place earlier on Friday, as residents were observing the Jewish Sabbath, came a day after an Israeli military raid killed nine Palestinians in the West Bank, including an elderly woman.

Thursday’s raid, the deadliest single incursion into the West Bank since 2002, came on the heels of a particularly bloody month that saw the deaths of at least 30 Palestinians – both activists and civilians – in confrontations with Israelis in the West Bank.

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