There are fresh fears of a new Palestinian uprising following the outbreak of clashes in East Jerusalem. It comes after Israeli police shot dead a 32-year-old Palestinian man suspected of having tried late last night to kill a far-right Jewish activist. Moataz Hejazi’s body lay in a pool of blood among satellite dishes on the rooftop of a three-storey house in Abu Tor, a district of Arab East Jerusalem as Israeli forces sealed the area and repelled stone-throwing Palestinian protesters.
Yehuda Glick has led a campaign for Jews to be allowed to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Jerusalem’s most sensitive site and holy to Islam and Judaism. He was shot and seriously wounded as he left a conference, his assailant escaping on the back of a motorbike. Glick’s far-right followers subsequently urged his supporters to march on Al-Aqsa this morning. That prompted Israeli police to shut access to the site to everyone; a rare blanket measure, which the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced as “tantamount to a declaration of war”.