Palestinians clash with Israeli police after body is found

Date: 

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

July 2, 2014: An Israeli police officer gestures in the Jerusalem Forest where a body was found.Reuters

Israeli police discovered the body of a Palestinian teen in a forest west of Jerusalem Wednesday, leading to clashes with Palestinians and fears that the crime may have been a revenge attack for the murder of three Israeli teens whose bodies were found in the West Bank earlier this week.

Hundreds of angry youths blocked the Holy City's light rail and threw stones at Israeli security forces, who responded with rubber bullets, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said authorities also used tear gas against the crowds.

Rosenfeld added that police received reports Wednesday that an Arab teen was forced into a car. A body was later found, but police have not yet established whether the two incidents are related.

He said security was heightened in Jerusalem, with extra units dispatched and the city's light rail train service cut short to avoid the scene of the violence. Police also closed a key holy site in Jerusalem's Old City to visitors after rock throwing there.

Israeli officials urged calm as police investigated the incidents, hoping to contain the violence.

"Everything is being examined. There are many possibilities. There is a criminal possibility as well as a political one," Israel's public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, told Israel Radio. "I am telling everyone, let us wait patiently."

Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Israel was being held responsible for the death and called on it to "find the killers and hold them accountable," according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.

There was no immediate word on casualties resulting from the clashes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged authorities to swiftly investigate the "reprehensible murder" and called on all sides "not to take the law into their own hands."

The Arab teen, identified as 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was approached by a car early Wednesday and then forced into it before it sped off, his cousin Saed Abu Khdeir told The Associated Press.

The discovery comes after several hundred right-wing Israeli youths marched through Jerusalem on Tuesday, demanding revenge for the murders of the Israeli teens. Five Palestinians were attacked, two of whom required medical treatment, and 50 people were arrested after violent confrontations with police that lasted several hours in the capital's center.

Israel has accused Hamas of abducting and killing the three teens, and has arrested hundreds of its members across the West Bank. Rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has meanwhile intensified, and been met with Israeli air strikes.

On Tuesday, thousands attended the funerals of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, the three Jewish seminary students who disappeared last month and whose bodies were found Monday in a field near the West Bank city of Hebron.

The three young men were buried side by side in the central Israeli town of Modiin. Mourners arrived in large convoys of buses arranged for the ceremony.

Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres eulogized the teens at the joint funeral, located near the boys’ family homes, according to the Jerusalem Post.

"Today has spontaneously become a national day of mourning,” Netanyahu said.