TWO people, one of them a child, were killed in a car-ramming attack on a bus stop in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on Friday, Israeli authorities said.
The attack, which comes amid spiralling violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this year, was condemned by Washington as “unconscionable”.
A police spokesperson said that at around 1:30 pm (1130 GMT) the driver of the car, a 31-year-old resident of Issawiya, a Palestinian neighbourhood of east Jerusalem, hit “at high speed (…) innocent people waiting at the bus stop”.
“As a result of the ramming, there are two dead and another five injured,” an Israeli police statement added.
“The suspect was neutralised on the spot” in Ramot, a Jewish settler neighbourhood of east Jerusalem, the police said, describing it as a “terror” attack.
Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek hospital said one of the dead was 20 years old, while police later said the child was aged six.
A hospital spokesperson identified the 20-year-old as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a yeshiva student who died from his injuries shortly after being admitted.
The spokesperson added that a second child, aged eight, was in a critical condition, with doctors “fighting to keep him alive”.
An AFP journalist at the scene of the attack saw a blue car that had crashed into a bus stop. A pink child’s doll was in the debris nearby.
Israel’s far-right Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was taken to task at the scene by protesters for failing to live up to his election promises to restore security.
He reiterated his desire to “implement death penalty legislation for terrorists”.
A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had “decided to take immediate action to seal and demolish the home of the terrorist”.
Late last month, an attack killed six Israelis and a Ukrainian outside a synagogue in east Jerusalem, a day after the deadliest Israeli army raid in years in the occupied West Bank claimed 10 lives.
The synagogue attack on the Jewish Sabbath was the deadliest targeting Israeli civilians in more than a decade.
