Suspected accomplice in Jerusalem stabbing attack nabbed

A Palestinian resident of Jerusalem’s Old City was arrested early Tuesday on suspicion of being an accomplice in a stabbing attack that moderately injured an Israeli man there the night before.

The 18-year-old will be brought before the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court later on Tuesday for a remand hearing. He will likely face charges of aiding a terrorist.

The suspected assailant, an 18-year-old Palestinian, was arrested late Monday night hours after he fled the scene of the attack.

According to police, the suspect, a resident of the West Bank, admitted during questioning to stabbing the Israeli man in the back on al-Khaldaya Street, near the Lions’ Gate.

Israel Police spokesperson Luba Samri on Monday said that officers found a knife at the scene.

The victim, said to be an ultra-Orthodox man in his 60s, told officials that after he was stabbed he walked some 300 meters to the Austrian Hospice to get help. He was then taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment. Hospital officials described him as stable and conscious.

Monday’s stabbing comes amid weeks of relative calm after months of roiling, near-daily violence in the capital.

Last month, Israeli officials pointed to a marked decrease in Palestinian stabbing, shooting and car-ramming attacks in and around Jerusalem, following six months of near-daily assaults which had wracked Israel and the West Bank.

The calm had been previously shattered by an April 18 bus bombing, in which a Palestinian resident of Bethlehem blew himself up in Jerusalem, injuring 20 people and killing himself. Israel said the attacker was a Hamas member; while the terror group praised the attack, it avoided claiming responsibility.

Twenty-nine Israelis and four others have been killed in the recent wave of terror attacks. Some 200 Palestinians have also been killed, some two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.