AFP/Jerusalem
A Palestinian drove a car into Israelis at a Jerusalem bus stop yesterday injuring eight people before being shot dead, police and rescue services said.
Police said the Palestinian, 21-year-old Abdul Mohsen Hassouna from Beit Hanina in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, had died, while Israel’s medical services said none of the victims’ injuries were life-threatening.
According to police, the alleged attacker also had an axe inside the car.
Images of the scene online showed a car rammed into a bus stop on the sidewalk near the western entrance to the city.
Since October 1, almost daily attacks by Palestinians and clashes with Israeli soldiers have killed 117 on the Palestinian side, 17 Israelis, an American and an Eritrean.
More than half of the Palestinian fatalities have been alleged attackers, while others have been shot dead by Israeli security forces during clashes.
On Sunday, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl was shot after allegedly trying to carry out a stabbing attack near the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied West Bank.
Young Palestinians have grown frustrated with Israel’s occupation and the complete lack of progress in peace efforts, in addition to their own fractured leadership.
Two-thirds of Palestinians support the wave of stabbings against Israelis, with the same percentage backing a larger armed uprising, a poll released yesterday found.
Sixty-seven percent back the use of knives, while 66% of those asked said an armed Intifada or uprising would “serve Palestinian national interests in ways that negotiations could not”, the survey by the respected Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) found.
At the same time, nearly three-quarters said they opposed the involvement of “young schoolgirls” in stabbings.
Speaking yesterday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that young Palestinian demonstrators were “driven by despair (at the fact) that a two-state solution is not coming”.
The PSR survey, which interviewed 1,270 people in 127 randomly selected locations, showed just 45% of Palestinians support the two-state solution and only 34% think it is feasible because of the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
According to the survey, 65% of Palestinians also want Abbas to resign, and if presidential elections took place he would lose to Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip.
Abbas’s mandate expired in 2009 but no vote is scheduled because of divisions between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas.
