Israel bristled on Thursday at U.S. suggestions it may have used excessive force to confront Palestinian stabbings, and also published hospital images it said refuted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's allegation a teen suspect had been “executed.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was using legitimate force and any other country would do the same to deal with “people wielding knives, meat cleavers, axes, trying to kill people on their streets”.
Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon accused Washington of “misreading” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying shooting knife-wielding Palestinians was self-defence. Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan called the U.S. remarks “foolish”.
Thirty-two Palestinians and seven Israelis have been killed in the past two weeks of bloodshed. The Palestinian dead include 10 knife-wielding assailants, police said, as well as children and protesters shot in violent demonstrations.
The violence has been triggered in part by Palestinians' anger over what they see as increased Jewish encroachment on Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, which is Islam's holiest site outside Saudi Arabia and is also revered by Jews as the location of two destroyed biblical Jewish temples.
At a daily press briefing on Wednesday, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Israel, which has set up roadblocks in Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem to try to stem attacks, has a right and responsibility to protect its citizens.
He added: “Now, we have seen some – I wouldn't call the checkpoints this – but we've certainly seen some reports of what many would consider excessive use of force.
“Obviously, we don't like to see that, and we want to see restrictions that are elevated in this time of violence to be as temporary as possible if they have to be enacted,” Kirby said, without citing specific incidents.
Asked at a news conference for the foreign media in Jerusalem about those remarks, Netanyahu said:
“What do you think would happen in New York if you saw people rushing into crowds trying to murder people? What do you think they would do? Do you think they would do anything differently than we are doing?”
PALESTINIAN ALLEGATIONS
Kirby's comments touched a nerve in Israel, especially after allegations by Abbas, in a televised speech in Arabic on Wednesday, that Israeli forces were “executing our sons in cold blood, as they did with this child, Ahmed Manasra, and other children in Jerusalem and other places in Palestine”.
Many Palestinians were incensed by amateur video that had shown Manasra, 13, lying on the street in Pisgat Zeev, a Jewish settlement on the northern edge of Jerusalem, with blood coming from his head. Israeli police said that he and a cousin stabbed two Israelis there on Monday.
The 15-year-old cousin was shot dead, and Israel said that day that Manasra was alive and taken to hospital after being hit by a car during the attack. On Thursday, after Abbas's address, Israel's Government Press Office released a video, without sound, showing a youth in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital.
A doctor said he could be discharged soon. His family confirmed the boy shown in the video was Manasra.
Hours after the Israeli roadblocks went up on Wednesday, a Palestinian stabbed and wounded a 70-year-old woman outside Jerusalem's central bus station before a police officer shot him dead.
Palestinian officials describe the roadblocks as collective punishment.
Prior to the bus station incident, another Palestinian was shot dead after he attempted to stab paramilitary police at an entrance to Jerusalem's walled Old City, police said.
Israel has deployed 300 soldiers in Jerusalem and throughout the country to try to stop the most serious eruption of Palestinian street attacks since an uprising in 2000-2005.
Many Palestinians are frustrated with the failure of years of peace diplomacy meant to bring them statehood and end Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
The powerful Islamist group Hamas, which advocates Israel's destruction, has been vocal in supporting the current attacks, and it called for “rallies of anger and confrontations” to be held in West Bank cities after Friday Muslim prayers.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said he plans to travel to the Middle East soon to try to calm the violence.
“A suggestion was raised that John Kerry and I and King Abdullah (of Jordan) and others would meet,” Netanyahu told the news conference.
“I have no problem with that, we did that a year ago, it was actually fruitful. It could happen again,” he said, adding that he was willing to meet Abbas.
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