Violence between Israelis and Palestinians threatened to spiral out of control yesterday with two more Palestinians killed in Gaza, two stabbings outside Jerusalem's Old City and more West Bank clashes.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president Mahmud Abbas have sought to avoid an escalation, frustrated Palestinian youths have defied efforts to restore calm and a wave of stabbings has spread fear in Israel.
The violence has raised concerns about a new Palestinian uprising.
Police said two ultra-Orthodox Jewish men were wounded in the knife attack by a 16-year-old Palestinian near Jerusalem's walled Old City. Earlier, paramilitary police shot dead a militant who had opened fire at them during late-night clashes at the Palestinian Shuafat refugee camp, police said.
Tensions have surged in 11 days of violence in which four Israelis and 17 Palestinians - including several Palestinians shot by police, have been killed in Jerusalem, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and in Israeli cities.
Scores of Palestinians have been injured in clashes with Israeli troops and at least 12 Israelis have been wounded in almost daily Palestinian stabbing attacks.
The violence has been fuelled by Palestinian fears that visits by Jewish groups, including lawmakers, to the Jerusalem Old City plaza revered in Judaism as the site of two destroyed biblical temples are eroding Muslim religious control of the al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest shrine.
The violence is not of the intensity of two Palestinian uprisings in the late 1980s and early 2000s but it has prompted talk of a third "intifada".
On Friday Israeli soldiers shot dead seven Palestinians in protests near the Gaza border and a knife-wielding Israeli wounded four Arabs in the southern Israeli town of Dimona.
It was the worst day of violence in the Palestinian enclave since last summer's war with Israel, which killed more than 2,200 and left 100,000 homeless.
Also on Friday, the Israeli military said Gaza militants fired a rocket into southern Israel. No group claimed responsibility. The attack caused no casualties or damage.
The clashes came as Hamas's chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, called the overall violence an intifada and urged further unrest.
Hamas, which rules Gaza, remains deeply divided from Abbas's West Bank-based Fatah.
Meanwhile, Israeli security forces have arrested approximately 400 Palestinians since the October 1 outbreak of violence in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, the Palestinian Prisoner Club said yesterday.
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