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Gaza war may be over but Jerusalem is still simmering


From the Guardian - Tariq Abu Khdeir has been arrested twice this summer. The first time, Israeli police accused the 22-year-old of participating in the riots in July in East Jerusalem’s Shuafat following the kidnapping and murder by Jewish extremists of his 16-year-old cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, whose burned body was found in the Jerusalem Forest.

Last week, the police came again for Tariq, this time at 1.30am, accusing him and two other cousins of throwing stones at the light railway trains that run through East Jerusalem – a charge he denies.

“They took me for interrogation to the police station in Neve Yaakov,” he says. “It was full. There were young guys in there accused of everything – from throwing stones and fireworks. Everything.”

Tariq Abu Khdeir is one of more than 700 Palestinians from East Jerusalem, 260 of them children as young as 13, who have been arrested in the continuing crackdown on what those on both sides have tried to define as the beginnings of a “kids’ intifada”.

But however the events are defined, the situation in Jerusalem is as tense and fraught as it has been in years, a state of affairs that has intensified since Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s murder, carried out in revenge for the kidnap and murder of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank.

But while those events may have been the trigger, many believe the current crisis has been far longer in the making. more

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