MDA armoured ambulance > Tewfik, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
19 people have been injured, with one confirmed casualty, following two explosions in West Jerusalem this morning in what is thought to be a double terror attack.
A third bomb was defused last night on the light rail track near Jerusalem’s central bus station.
The first victim of the attack has been named as 16-year-old Aryeh Shtsupak, a Canadian yeshiva student living in Jerusalem.
Deputy mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahoum told the Jewish Chronicle that authorities believe the terrorists to be “homegrown in Jerusalem and radicalised by extremist groups”.
Both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad welcomed the attack, but stopped short of claiming responsibility.
The attacks this morning follow a wave of terrorist incidents across Israel which have been without parallel in the past decade.
On Tuesday, Palestinian gunmen stormed a hospital in Jenin in the northern West Bank and seized an 18-year-old Druze-Israeli, Tiran Ferro, who was on a ventilator at the time.
His kidnapping followed his being injured in a car crash in Jenin, after which he was taken to hospital.
Ferro’s father claimed that the gunmen fired their weapons in the air before disconnecting his life support machine and throwing him into a vehicle.