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REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

Conflict Between Israel and Palestinians Continues to Escalate

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JERUSALEM — A new front opened in the military showdown between the Israeli Army and Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday as a wave of mob violence between Jews and Arabs spread across several Israeli cities, leading to riots and attacks in the streets as rockets and missiles streaked across the sky.

Israel said it assassinated 10 senior militants and continued to pound both military and residential areas across the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, while Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, and its allies continued to fire rockets into civilian areas across central and southern Israel.

More than 1,000 rockets had been fired from Gaza by Wednesday night, most of them intercepted by an antimissile defense system, the Israeli military said.

expel several families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, approached — a case that quickly became a stand-in for historic expulsions of Palestinians from their land elsewhere in Israel.

The situation finally boiled over after a police raid on one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, on Monday, which the police said was in response to stone-throwing by Palestinian demonstrators.

Hamas launched long-range rockets at Jerusalem on Monday evening, prompting Israel to respond with airstrikes. The military conflict also unleashed a wave of protests and rioting in Arab areas across Israel that night.

discriminatory laws, not least a recent law that downgraded the status of the Arabic language and said that only Jews had the right to determine the nature of the Israeli state.

“The way that we are treated is as though we shouldn’t be here,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian political analyst from Haifa, a northern city in Israel, and a former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization. “We are the people who they mistakenly did not ethnically cleanse from this place.”

In the central city of Lod, the government declared a state of emergency early Wednesday after a synagogue, school and several vehicles were burned by Arab rioters on Monday and Tuesday nights.

A Palestinian citizen, Moussa Hassouna, was shot dead by a Jewish resident during the disturbances on Monday night, and another wave of unrest followed his funeral 24 hours later.

The Israeli police said that Arab mobs were pulling Jews from their homes and trying to kill them.

“I feel like it’s 100 years ago, and I’m a defenseless Jew in the pogroms,” said Shabtai Pessin, 27, standing in a burned-out classroom at a religious school in Lod. “What’s our sin? Wanting a Jewish state after 2000 years of exile?”

In the northern city of Acre, a popular Jewish fish restaurant was set on fire, while Arab Bedouins attacked police stations and passing cars in the Negev desert, in southern Israel.

On Wednesday, these riots prompted crowds of Jews to respond.

In the cities of Or Akiva and Beersheva, Jews stoned the cars of people they believed to be Arab. In Tiberias, they threw rocks at hotels housing Arabs, who hurled objects from their windows in return. Cars were set on fire in several towns. And an Arab mob in Haifa ransacked a Jewish-owned hotel.

“It’s happening as we speak,” the hotel’s owner, Evan Fallenberg, said by phone on Wednesday night. “People are saying this is a rupture that we won’t be able to overcome. I don’t believe that — I know my friendships are lasting ones. But it is going to put everything to the test. We’re headed into something extremely difficult and dangerous, and I don’t know where this is going to end or how.”

Reporting was contributed by Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel; Irit Pazner Garshowitz and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem; Iyad Abuhweila from Gaza City; Megan Specia from London; and Annie Karni from Washington.

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