Deadly East Jerusalem shooting ‘likely to have originated in occupied West Bank’
The shooting attack in occupied East Jerusalem in which five people were killed was most likely to have originated from the occupied West Bank, rather than from Hamas in Gaza, Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg says.
Speaking from Tel Aviv, Goldberg told Al Jazeera he “seriously” doubted it had been ordered by Hamas.
If Hamas had carried out the attack, then it would mean the Palestinian group was “trying to step up its resistance to what is beginning to look like a superimposed attempt to end the war,” he said, referring to comments from the Trump administration that it is working on a solution to the war in Gaza.
“It seems much more like that this came from the West Bank or around Jerusalem,” he said, adding that the situation for Palestinians there was “quite dire in financial and political terms”.
“Israel has been maintaining a blockade on the West Bank; it has been denying tens of thousands of Palestinians the ability to work for a living,” he said.
“The economic situation all over the West Bank is as bad as it has ever been. The Palestinian Authority is not up to the task, mainly because Israel is not allowing it to handle the situation.”
Israeli authorities trying to piece together first major attack in Jerusalem since 2023
Israeli authorities are saying the two perpetrators are from an area in the occupied West Bank that is just west of occupied East Jerusalem. They say the two worked in tandem in this attack, that two gunmen boarded a bus – witnesses say one of them was dressed as a ticket inspector – and opened fire.
We are now hearing that five people out of the initial 20 injured have been killed. Four of them are men, one is a woman in her 50s.
This attack took place near an illegal settlement of Ramot, just north of West Jerusalem, and if you look at where the Green Line is on a map, it actually bleeds into occupied East Jerusalem.
These settlements are deemed illegal under international law and are buildings and structures that infringe on the rights of Palestinians and destroy territorial continuity for a future Palestinian state.
Israeli officials are now trying to wrap their heads around how exactly this happened, saying that they haven’t seen something like this happen in years, saying that the last shooting like this in the greater Jerusalem area was back in November 2023.
‘The situation Israel finds itself in is not sustainable’
The deadly attack in Jerusalem underlines that Israel has stretched itself unsustainably thin from a security perspective as it pursues fights on multiple fronts, Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg says.
“The main message here … is that the Israeli blanket is way too short,” Goldberg told Al Jazeera from Tel Aviv. “It can’t cover everything.”
He said the number of security personnel present in the area of the attack had decreased, as greater numbers were required in the occupied West Bank to enforce the Israeli occupation.
Meanwhile, he said, the intensified offensive in Gaza had drawn further troops into that war while Israel was also embroiled in “hopeless adventures in Lebanon and Syria that also require more manpower”.
“Israel is not able to keep its act together, not in Jerusalem, not in the West Bank, in Gaza, and not in Lebanon and Syria,” he said. “The situation Israel finds itself in is not sustainable.”
