Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

2 Knife-Wielding Palestinians Killed by Israeli Troops

Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian youth on Saturday as he tried to attack them with a knife at a checkpoint in the Jerusalem area, police said.

The incident occurred at around midnight near the A-Zayyim checkpoint on the outskirts of East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, land Israel captured in a 1967 war that Palestinians seek for a state.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said 17-year-old Ali Abu Ghannam first tried to slash paramilitary Israeli border police with a cleaver at another checkpoint nearby, and then fled with troops giving chase and firing warning shots in the air.

Reaching A-Zayyim checkpoint, Abu Ghannam drew a second knife and ran toward security guards there. They shot him when he ignored their warnings to stop, Samri said.

Abu Ghannam’s family rejected the Israeli account of the incident. One relative, Mohammed Abu Ghannam, said he did not believe the boy had been armed and that he was on his way back from a friend’s party when he was killed.

The family was refusing to receive the body, Mohammed Abu Ghannam said, because Israeli authorities had ordered a limit on the number of people allowed at the burial — a measure often imposed by Israel at the funerals of Palestinian militants in Jerusalem.

Stone-throwing Palestinian protesters faced off with Israeli riot police in East Jerusalem later on Saturday, Samri said, adding that one policeman was lightly injured.

The official Palestinian news agency WAFA quoted President Mahmoud Abbas’s office saying Abu Ghannam’s killing “emphasized the ugliness of the occupation and its crimes against the defenseless Palestinian people under baseless and incorrect pretexts.”

Violence in the Jerusalem area has flared up intermittently since Israelis killed a Palestinian youth in revenge for the killings of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers last year, just before a 50-day July-August Gaza war.

Israeli tanks fired at Gaza on Friday after Israel said a rocket was fired from the Hamas Islamist dominated territory during Independence Day celebrations a day earlier. There were no casualties in those incidents.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.