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Jerusalem Is Rocked by Multiple Knife Attacks

Violence continues to intensify in Israel, and today police shot dead a Palestinian man who they say tried to stab an officer in Jerusalem. A Palestinian passerby disputed the official account.
Photo by Jim Hollander/EPA

WARNING: Graphic photo below

Palestinians escalated the pace of stabbing attacks in the Jerusalem area on Monday and Israeli police shot dead two of the alleged assailants in the worst spell of street violence for several years.

In the space of one hour, Israeli police said a knife-wielding Palestinian woman wounded a paramilitary border policeman in central Jerusalem and two men carried out stabbings that injured two Israelis, one of them critically, in the Israeli settlement of Pisgat Zeev on the northern edge of the city.

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The woman was shot and wounded. Israeli police said one of the assailants in Pisgat Zeev, built on occupied land that Israel annexed to Jerusalem after the 1967 Middle East war, was shot and killed and the other was injured.

Hours earlier, a border policeman shot dead a Palestinian who police said tried to stab him, according to Israeli police. The account was disputed by a Palestinian passerby, who said he witnessed the incident and saw no knife.

Israeli paramilitary police shot dead the Palestinian man at an entrance to Jerusalem's walled Old City on Monday, saying he had tried to stab an officer on patrol.

A Palestinian passerby disputed the police account, saying he had seen officers shout at the man, then shoot him four times. "I saw no knife on him," Hussam Wshah, 66, told Reuters.

Four Israelis and 25 Palestinians, including seven alleged assailants and eight children, have died in 12 days of bloodshed, stirred in part by Muslim anger over increasing Jewish visits to the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

Near-daily knife attacks have raised concerns Palestinians could be embarking on another uprising, or intifada, reflecting a new generation's frustrations over a veteran leadership's failure to achieve statehood in peace efforts that collapsed in 2014.

Israel has poured reinforcements into Jerusalem, with no diplomatic initiatives on the horizon and Israeli leaders warning there could be no quick fix to largely "lone wolf" assaults.

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At the Old City's Lions Gate, paramilitary border police ordered a Palestinian to halt for an identity check, instructing him "to take his hands out of his pockets," a police spokesman said.

"The terrorist approached the policeman with a knife in his hand and stabbed him in his protective vest," the spokesman said. "The policeman was unhurt and other officers reacted swiftly and shot and killed him."

Officers released a video to the media showing a body and a knife on the ground but not the alleged confrontation.

Israeli police inspect the body of a Palestinian man who police shot and killed outside the Lion's Gate entrance to the Muslim Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City on October 12. (Photo by Noam Rivkin Fenton/EPA)

Wshah, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, said he witnessed the events from several meters away.

"The young man was walking when they shouted at him. He may not have heard them, and they fired directly at him four times and he fell to the ground," Wshah told Reuters.

Violence has spread from Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Israel's interior and Hamas-ruled Gaza. On Sunday, an Israeli Arab stabbed and wounded four people near a bus stop in the north of the country. He was overpowered and arrested.

Related: Israeli Airstrikes in the Gaza Strip Kill Pregnant Woman and Her Toddler

Israeli Arabs have demonstrated in support of Palestinian protests in the occupied West Bank that have accompanied the surge in attacks.

Muslim anger has been stoked by increasing visits made over the past year by Jewish groups and right-wing lawmakers to al-Aqsa mosque compound, which is also revered by Jews as the site of two destroyed biblical temples.

Israel has said it has no intention of allowing any change to the status quo under at Islam's third holiest site, which Jews are allowed to visit but where non-Muslim prayer is banned.

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