JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a bus stop on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday, killing six people in what police described as “a terrorist attack,” one of the deadliest in the city in the past few years.
Footage from a dashboard camera at the scene showed people fleeing from the vicinity of a bus stopped by the side of a road as shots rang out. Another video showed a bus’s windscreen and windows pierced with bullet holes.
“Suddenly I hear the shots starting … I felt like I was running for an eternity,” Ester Lugasi, who was injured in the attack, told Israeli TV from hospital. “I thought I was going to die.”
The ambulance service identified the five of the victims as a 50-year-old man, a woman in her fifties and three men in their thirties. It said 11 other people had suffered injuries, including six who were in a serious condition with gunshot wounds.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said later a sixth person had died and that the gunmen were Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a statement which condemned “any targeting of Palestinian and Israeli civilians”.
But Palestinian militant group Hamas praised two Palestinian “resistance fighters” who it said had carried out the attack and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group, also praised the shooting. Neither group claimed responsibility.
Speaking at the scene of the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces were pursuing suspects who aided them.
Israeli police said two attackers arrived by car and opened fire at a bus stop at Ramot Junction, an area straddling a part of Jerusalem that Israel captured in the 1967 war and later annexed in a move unrecognized by the United Nations and most countries.
Several weapons, ammunition and a knife used by the attackers were recovered at the scene, police said.
Reuters footage showed a heavy police presence in the Ramot area following the shooting. The ambulance service said a paramedic arriving at the scene reported that several victims were lying on the road and the sidewalk, some unconscious.
The Israeli military said it had deployed soldiers to the area who were aiding police in the search for suspects. Soldiers were also operating in areas of Ramallah in the West Bank to conduct interrogations and “thwart terrorism”, it said.
In October 2024, two Palestinians, one armed with a gun and the other armed with a knife, killed seven people in Tel Aviv. In November 2023, two Palestinian gunmen killed three people at a Jerusalem bus stop. Israeli security services said that the attackers in the 2023 Jerusalem shooting were linked to Hamas.
(Reporting by Rami Amichay and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Alexander Cornwell in Tel Aviv, Ahmed Elimam and Jana Choukeir in Dubai; Editing by Gareth Jones and Ros Russell)
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