The grandmother of Abdelrahman Shaludi poses for a picture with his portrait at their family home in the Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan yesterday.
AFP
Jerusalem
Clashes broke out yesterday in East Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israeli police ahead of the funeral of a Palestinian who ploughed his car into a crowd of pedestrians, killing two.
The heavily armed police used teargas to repel hundreds of Palestinians taking part in a “symbolic funeral” ceremony for Abdelrahman Shaludi, the 21-year-old Palestinian shot dead after ramming his car into a Jerusalem crowd on Wednesday.
A three-month-old girl was killed on the spot and six other people hurt.
Yesterday evening a 22-year-old Ecuadorian woman who had been critically hurt in the attack died of her injuries, said Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital.
Police had been due to return Shaludi’s body to his family after a post mortem, and only 20 people were to have been allowed to attend the funeral at 2100 GMT under a court order.
Jawad Siyyam, an activist from Silwan, where the Shaludis reside, alleged that Israel had threatened the family they would bury him on their own if they did not accept the conditions.
His family rejected those terms, but eventually the two sides agreed 70 people could attend, according to Siyyam.
A police spokeswoman confirmed the body would be handed over, but denied the quota had grown to 70 participants.
Already yesterday the family held what it called a “symbolic funeral” in honour of the “martyr” Shaludi in Silwan, a sensitive Palestinian sector close to Jerusalem’s Old City.
Hundreds of Palestinians attended the ceremony, bearing an empty casket and reciting prayers, before trying to ascend to the Al Aqsa mosque compound, the epicentre of recent tensions.
Police said they arrested one person in the Silwan clashes. Elsewhere in East Jerusalem police arrested two youths in Issawiya for throwing stones.
Shaludi was shot dead by police as he fled on foot from what Israeli authorities branded a “terror attack” that killed Haya Zissel Braun, the three-month-old Israeli girl who was also a US national.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Jerusalem’s security forces were reinforced with an extra 1,000 police and border police, including special forces.
“We will not allow the reality of Jerusalem to become one of throwing stones and firebombs, and disturbances,” he said.
Netanyahu blamed “extremist Islamic elements” for being behind the attempts to “incite Israel’s capital”.
“We will use all the force necessary, resolutely and responsibly, to ensure they do not succeed,” he vowed.
Clashes have been taking place since Wednesday throughout a tense East Jerusalem, which has been the scene of ongoing unrest since on a nightly basis since the murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists in July.
Clashes intensified during the 50-day Gaza war over the summer. Israel seized Arab East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, in a move never recognised by the international community.
Some 200,000 Israelis live there alongside about 300,000 Palestinians.
Much of Palestinian anger is focused on Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and in particular on Silwan—a densely-populated Arab neighbourhood on a steep hillside just south of the Old City.
Silwan hit the headlines in the past month when settlers acquired another 35 apartments there, triggering outrage from the Palestinians and US condemnation.
On Friday, Israeli media reported that hardline Housing Minister Uri Ariel was considering moving into Silwan, a move that would boost tensions.
Israel regards the entire city of Jerusalem as its “undivided capital” and does not see construction or the purchase of houses in the eastern sector as settlement activity.
The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
