Israel to step up West Bank response after East Jerusalem shooting attack

CCTV footage shows a dense crowd. Several dozen people were waiting at a bus stop for line 62 in an East Jerusalem neighborhood on Monday, September 8, shortly after 10 a.m. Two gunmen fired into the crowd , which included many residents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, causing panic. They then opened fire inside a bus. The toll was high: six dead, eight wounded, five seriously. A "terrorist" attack, police declared in the morning. Authorities announced that the two attackers, killed by a soldier and an armed civilian, came from villages near Ramallah, under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The army immediately surrounded the area where they came from.

The attack served as a stark reminder to Israelis that the West Bank remains one of the "seven fronts" of the war, as defined by their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, since October 7, 2023, along with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, and Syria. A largely invisible conflict, even though it has caused the deaths of 987 Palestinians killed by the army or settlers in the West Bank over the past twenty-three months, according to data updated by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The six deaths from the attack add to the 52 Israelis killed since October 2023, according to a UN tally that ends at the end of July. "We are waging an intense war against terrorism on several fronts," said Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the scene of the attack.

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