JERUSALEM
Israeli forces have detained a Palestinian man in the West Bank city of Ramallah on suspicion that he had stabbed two Israeli policemen last week, local Israeli media reported Friday.
Israel's Channel Two said that the Palestinian man had been hiding in Ramallah after he allegedly stabbed two Israeli officers in East Jerusalem last Friday.
No Palestinian account of the detention incident has been provided thus far.
Israeli police had said that two officers had been stabbed and lightly wounded in occupied East Jerusalem near the Lion Gate checkpoint, a gateway to East Jerusalem's Old City where Al-Aqsa Mosque Complex is located.
One officer was reportedly injured in the neck and the other in the hand, according to Israeli police.
The Israeli army has yet to comment on the Palestinian suspect's arrest.
Tension has mounted in Jerusalem – and in the rest of the occupied West Bank – ever since the kidnap and murder of three Israeli settlers last summer and the subsequent abduction and murder of a Palestinian teenager.
Both incidents preceded a devastating Israeli military onslaught on the Gaza Strip in July and August of last year which left over 2,160 Palestinians dead – the vast majority of them civilians – and some 11,000 injured.
The rising tensions in Jerusalem even further escalated some two months ago, when Israel briefly closed occupied East Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound after an extremist rabbi was shot and injured by a Palestinian man in West Jerusalem.
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