REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JERUSALEM -- On edge but faithful to their religious routine, worshippers returned on Wednesday to the Jerusalem synagogue where four rabbis and a policeman were killed in a Palestinian attack a day earlier.
The bloodstains had been washed away. But four memorial candles burned as about a dozen men chanted their daily prayers and police newly stationed outside guarded the Kehillat Bnei Torah congregation.
"It’s a little scary, but we’re going to have to go on with our lives. We're staying here, we're not moving anywhere ... this terrorist attack is not going to change anything," said Avraham Burkei, a member of the synagogue in Jewish West Jerusalem.
Palestinians in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem also voiced concern about their safety amid the surge in violence, as police set up checkpoints in their neighborhoods and tethered surveillance balloons floated overhead. In the dead of night, a large explosion rattled windows in the city as Israel blew up the home of a Palestinian who last month ran over and killed two people at a Jerusalem tram stop before police fatally shot him.
Pointing to armed police checking cars and pedestrians on a road leading to the center of town, Imram Abu al-Hawa, a 40-year-old Palestinian, spoke of humiliation and concern about revenge attacks.
"They (police) say, 'do you have a knife, where are you going?'" he said. "They can go to hell. I used to work among Jews, now I'm afraid I'll get stabbed or attacked (by them)."
Violence in Jerusalem and other areas of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories has surged since July when a Palestinian teen was burned to death by Israeli assailants in alleged revenge for the abduction and killing of three Jewish teens by militants in the West Bank.
The collapse of US-brokered peace talks, renewed fighting in Gaza in the summer, and continued, internationally condemned Israeli settlement-building on land Palestinians seek for a state have also fanned the flames.
Tuesday's synagogue attack, in which the rabbis -- three of them dual US-Israeli citizens and the fourth a British-Israeli national -- were killed along with a Druze police officer by two attackers armed with knives and a gun, was the deadliest in Jerusalem since 2008.
The current wave of violence has defied clear definition -- Israeli officials insist it is not a new, tightly organized Palestinian uprising and cannot be compared with the Intifada that raged from 2000 to 2005.
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