“Our enemies are putting us to the test again,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said following a visit to the site of the attack with Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

There were no claims of responsibility, but Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the blockaded Gaza Strip, praised the attacks and linked them to the tensions around al-Aqsa mosque.

Friday prayers passed without major incident and apart from some stone-throwing, police said the situation had been quiet.

However twice this week Israeli police raided the mosque, where hundreds of thousands of worshippers have been praying during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, to dislodge groups they said had barricaded themselves with the aim of causing trouble.

Footage of officers beating worshippers who confronted them aroused concern, even among Israel’s allies, and prompted condemnation across the Arab world.

The site in Jerusalem’s Old City, holy to both Muslims and Jews, who know it as Temple Mount, has been a longstanding flashpoint, notably over the issue of Jewish visitors defying a ban on non-Muslim prayer in the mosque compound.

Clashes there in 2021 helped set off an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers and the exchange of crossborder fire awakened memories of that conflict but as the lull in fighting extended on Friday, neither side seemed keen to prolong the fighting.

“Nobody wants an escalation right now,” an Israeli army spokesman said. “Quiet will be answered with quiet, at this stage I think, at least in the coming hours.”

One official with a Palestinian militant group said they were ready to keep the calm should Israel do the same, with the group having “made its point”. A Qatari official said Qatar was helping international efforts to de-escalate the situation.

Even before the flare-up of the past few days, the West Bank has seen a surge of confrontations in the past several months, with frequent military raids and escalating settler violence amid a spate of attacks by Palestinians.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 18 Israelis and foreigners have been killed in attacks in Israel, around Jerusalem and in the West Bank. In the same period, Israeli forces have killed more than 80 Palestinians, most of them fighters in militant groups but some of them civilians.

In the aftermath of the overnight strikes in Gaza, streets were largely empty except for some taxis and emergency vehicles. In Gaza City’s Tufah neighbourhood some houses and a children’s hospital were damaged.

Taxi driver Muhanad Abu Neama, 23, said his family barely escaped Israeli airstrikes that hit near his house, filling rooms with dirt and debris and damaging his car.

“I could hardly see because of the dust, the dirt covered my sisters’ beds and I carried them out one by one,” he said.

With the international-led peace process long moribund, Palestinians’ hopes of creating an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, have faded. Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed it as its capital in a move not recognised internationally.

Israel’s new hard-right government is set on expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and includes members who rule out a Palestinian state. Hamas for its part spurns coexistence with Israel.

A US State Department spokesperson said on Friday that the U.S. “strongly condemns today’s terrorist attacks... The three horrific attacks today, in which three were killed and at least eight others wounded, affected citizens of Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The targeting of innocent civilians of any nationality is unconscionable.”

The police said four reserve companies of border police would be called up in the coming days.

Reuters

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