Hebron Three Palestinians were shot dead after Israeli forces claim they were trying to stab Israelis, as violence that has fuelled international concerns of a full-scale uprising showed no let-up.
The deadly unrest that has raged for more than two weeks prompted a “very concerned” US President Barack Obama to call for calm as the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on Friday.
40 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the month. Seven Israelis have been killed.
The mounting death toll has prompted fears of a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising, like those of 1987-93 and 2000-2005, when thousands were killed in near-daily violence.
Two of Saturday’s attacks happened in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron where some 500 Jewish colonists live in a heavily guarded enclave in the city centre surrounded by nearly 200,000 Palestinians.
The third happened at a checkpoint in a Jewish colony neighbourhood of Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem.
In the first attack in Hebron, a colonist shot dead an 18-year-old Palestinian boy, Fadhel Al Qawasmeh. According to the Israeli army, the boy tried to stab the colonist, but the colonist had no injuries.
Video circulated by Palestinian activists showed the Jewish colonist brandishing a pistol as shots rang out. It shows Al Qawasmeh’s body lying dead on the ground.
In the second attack, a female Israeli occupation soldier shot dead a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, who Israelis claim was trying to stab her.
In occupied east Jerusalem, a Palestinian tried to stab an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in East Talpiot but was shot dead by other soldiers.
Police said the assailant was a 16-year-old from nearby Jabel Mukaber, the same neighbourhood that was home to three Palestinians who carried out gun, knife and car-ramming attacks earlier this week.
Israeli occupation forces have deployed massively in Jerusalem to try to halt the attacks and on Wednesday began setting up checkpoints in parts of occupied east Jerusalem, including Jabel Mukaber.
The United States, which tried but failed last year to broker peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, urged leaders on both sides to help rein in the unrest.
“We are very concerned about the outbreak of violence,” Obama said in Washington.
“It’s important for both (Israeli) Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu... and (Palestinian) president (Mahmud) Abbas and other people in positions of power, to try to tamp down rhetoric that may feed violence or anger or misunderstanding,” he said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, who could travel to the region soon, has spoken separately to Abbas and Netanyahu to ask them to restore calm.
He told Abbas of the need to avoid “inflammatory rhetoric, accusations and actions that will increase tensions”, officials said.
On Friday, four Palestinians were killed, one after posing as a news photographer to stab and wound an occupation soldier outside a Jewish colony in Hebron.
As hundreds of Palestinians joined the funeral of Ayad Awawdeh in the West Bank village of Dura on Saturday, his mother told AFP her son had “watched the news on television the whole time and exploded with anger at seeing so many horrors”.
Such funerals may soon be a thing of the past - the Israeli regime has warned that it will no longer hand over the bodies of those responsible for attacks to their families for burial.
The Israeli regime has incited the violence after imposing strict restrictions on Palestinians from accessing their own holy site Al Haram Al Sharif while granting Jewish colonists rights to perform rituals there.
Al Haram Al Sharif is the third holiest site in Islam and is also revered by Jews call it the Temple Mount.
On Friday, the Israeli regime rejected Palestinian calls for an international protection force to be deployed to quell the violence around Al Haram Al Sharif.
