Saturday, December 28, after gunmen shot dead four seminary students at a nearby Jewish settlement and a car bomb rocked West Jerusalem, army officials said.
No one was hurt in the Jerusalem attack except the apparent bomber, who suffered light injuries when only one of the two gas canisters he planned to detonate went off, the Voice of America (VOA) and other media reports said.
He was arrested and police cordoned off the area around the place of incident which occurred at one 1 am local time in a popular nightlife district.
UNIFORMS
Just a few hours earlier, four Israelis were killed when two Palestinian gunmen dressed in Israeli army uniforms and carrying M-16 rifles opened fire inside the kitchen of a dining hall in the Jewish settlement known as Otniel, VOA said.
Witnesses said eight others were wounded in the adjacent dining room at Otniel, southwest of Hebron. The Reuters news agency quoted the Israeli army as saying that "it razed the homes of two militants on the outskirts of Hebron on Saturday" but it stressed that "the owners of the homes had nothing to do with the Otniel attack."
Witnesses said one of the homes belonged to a member of the Al Aqsa Brigades, a militant group affiliated with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, and the second was owned by a militant from Islamic Jihad.
JIHAD
Islamic Jihad has carried out many attacks against Israelis since a Palestinian uprising began when peace talks failed in September2000.
Palestinians and human rights groups denounce house demolitions as collective punishment as well as what Israel calls "targeted killings." Israel says the actions are necessary to deter suicide attacks which have killed many Jewish people, including women and children.
Christians in the region have in recent weeks urged churches around the world to pray for them amid the increasingly violent situation, which Palestinian and Israeli officials on both sites still call a "conflict" rather than "war".
