A shooting on Monday morning in the northern outskirts of Jerusalem left at least six people dead and several more seriously wounded, according to Israel’s ambulance service and hospital officials.
The police described the shooting as a terrorist attack and said that the perpetrators had been killed at the scene. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
The shooting occurred at about 10.15 a.m. when two gunmen opened fire at people waiting at a bus stop at a busy junction, the police said. The police added in a statement that a soldier and several civilians at the bus stop had “engaged the attackers and returned fire,” killing them on the spot.
The junction where the attack took place is in Ramot, a large area that Israel took in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and later annexed. The Palestinians and much of the rest of world consider Ramot to be a settlement in occupied territory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited the scene of the attack and said that his country was in a “war against terrorism” on several fronts.
“We are now in pursuit, encircling the villages the murderers came from,” he added.
Earlier, the Israeli military said it had dispatched soldiers to search for any additional suspects and that troops had been sent to seal off several areas on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said that the gunmen were Palestinians.
The attack comes at a fraught moment as Israel expands its nearly two-year campaign against Hamas into Gaza City, the main urban center of Gaza. In the West Bank, land grabs by Jewish settlers and attacks on Palestinians and their property have intensified in recent months, hitting a record high.
A paramedic, Fadi Dekaidek, said in an ambulance service statement that he had arrived in Ramot to find “a very difficult and tragic scene.”
“The wounded were lying on the road and sidewalk near a bus stop,” he added.
Four male victims were pronounced dead at the scene and about a dozen more casualties were transferred to hospitals, seven of them suffering serious injuries from gunshot wounds, according to the ambulance service. Two other victims were declared dead after arriving at hospitals, officials said.
Hamas, which led the attack on Israel in October 2023 that ignited the war in Gaza, praised Monday’s shooting without taking responsibility for it. In a statement, Hamas said the shooting was “a heroic and unique operation” and a “natural response” to what it described as Israel’s “ongoing aggression against our Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.”
Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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