Three people killed and 13 injured in Jerusalem shooting

Three people were killed and 13 injured after two brothers from East Jerusalem shot at people waiting at a bus stop on a main road in the rush hour towards the western edge of the city, local police and medics reported.

The gunmen were named by the Shin Bet security agency as Murad Namr, 38, and Ibrahim Namr, 30, and described by the intelligence service as members of Hamas. Both were killed on the scene by off-duty soldiers and an armed civilian.

Surveillance video footage of the bus stop showed two men getting out of a car at about 7.40am, brandishing guns, prompting people to flee in terror before they retreated to the vehicle, where police said they were killed.

The ambulance service said a 24-year-old woman had died on the scene, while a 73-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl, critically wounded, were pronounced dead at hospitals shortly after the incident. Media reports named the dead man as Elimelech Wasserman, a rabbinical judge.

Israeli police said the initial investigation indicated that the attackers arrived by car and were “armed with an M-16 rifle and a handgun”. They began shooting a civilians before subsequently being killed at the scene. A search of the car “revealed ammunition and weaponry”, the force added.

Shin Bet said that both gunmen had been previously jailed for terror activity. The elder brother, Murad, spent 10 years in jail to 2020 for planning terror attacks, under direction from Gaza, while Ibrahim had been jailed in 2014.

Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s security minister and leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, visited the scene and said the attack at the bus stop showed that the country needed to respond to Hamas militarily

“This type of incident proves again how much we can’t show weakness, how much we have to speak to Hamas only through intentions, only through the war,” he said, according to the Times of Israel. Ben Gvir has previously called for an end to the current truce.

He said the attack showed that Israeli civilians should carry guns on the street, the minister added. “Despite the criticism of all kinds of parties, I will continue this policy of handing out weapons everywhere,” he added .

Two hospitals received eight people in the aftermath of the attack, with five described in media reports as having serious injuries.