Jerusalem - Israel tightened security Friday, after a Palestinian gunman burst into a Jewish religious school in West Jerusalem the previous evening and killed eight students in the first such attack in the city in four years.
Palestinian access to Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque were limited on 07 March 07 due to the shooting attack at the Mercaz Harav 'yeshiva,' that killed eight Jewish seminary students. Only Muslim men over the age of 45 with a valid Israeli or Jerusalem identity card were allowed to enter the Temple Mount for prayers. Female worshippers were not limited from entering. EPA/MICHAL FATTAL
Fearing more attacks, thousands of police patrolled Jerusalem and set up roadblocks at its and other cities' entrances, while the Israeli army sealed off the West Bank, allowing no Palestinians to enter Israel except for special humanitarian or medical cases, police and the military said.
Thousands of Israelis meanwhile, many of them members of Israel's religious and ultra-Orthodox community, mourned the deaths of the eight students, aged 15 to 26, at the Mercaz Ha'Rav (Rabbi's Centre), one of the most prominent yeshivas in the country.
Ten other Israelis were injured in the shooting spree. Three were serious but stable and one was in moderate condition, hospital officials said.
It was the first attack causing multiple casualties in Jerusalem since February 2004, when a Palestinian suicide bomber killed eight and wounded dozens on a bus in central Jerusalem.
It was also the first multiple-casualty attack inside Israel since April 2006, when nine people died then in a Palestinian suicide at Tel Aviv's old central bus station, although two Palestinian bombers from the Gaza Strip killed an elderly Israeli woman in the southern town of Dimona just last month.
The gunman was identified as Ala Abu Dhein, about 25, a Palestinian with an Israeli identity card from the Jabal Mukaber neighbourhood in East Jerusalem.
A neighbour told Deutsche Presse-Agentur he had a transit and used to work in West Jerusalem, transporting students and workers.
He entered the yeshiva after 8 pm Thursday (1800 GMT), drew a Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifle from a cardboard box he was carrying, shot dead two people at the building's entrance and moved on to the library, where he began shooting in all directions as some 25 students were gathered inside, studying religious texts.
Witnesses said some students hid behind book cases, while others locked themselves inside an adjacent room, switched off the light and lay down on the floor, as the shooting continued for minutes until an Israeli army officer living nearby and alarmed by the gunshots killed the attacker, shooting him in the head several times.
Hamas announced over loudspeakers in Gaza mosque that it was claiming responsibility, hours after an Arab-Israeli group called the Free People of the Galilee told Hezbollah's al-Manar television in Beirut that it was behind the attack.
The Free People of the Galilee is believed to have links with the Lebanese Shiite movement, and also dubbed itself the death squad of Imad Mughniyeh - the Hezbollah military commander who was assassinated in Damascus in a car bomb blast last month - and the death squad of Gaza.
The family of the shooter erected a mourning tent in their East Jerusalem neighbourhood, adorned with flags of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Both groups have each vowed to avenge the death of Mughniyeh and of more than 120 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, in five days of Israeli airstrikes and heavy ground fighting between Israeli soldiers and local militants in the Gaza Strip since Wednesday last week.
The Israeli raids were retaliation for ongoing daily rocket attacks from Gaza, but the Palestinian death toll was the highest in fighting with Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, saying he was against the killing of civilians, whether Palestinians or Israelis, but in Gaza the attack was greeted with joy, as militants, mainly from Hamas, fired in the air and honked their car horns in celebration, while others handed out candy to passers-by in the street.
Abbas had earlier this week responded to the Gaza deaths by suspending negotiations with Israel that were recently revived after a seven-year freeze in the peace process. But he said after meeting visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he would resume the negotiations, which he called a 'strategic choice.'
The attack on the Jerusalem yeshiva was seen as a blow to the heart of Israel's religious-right, which demanded an end to concessions as several lawmakers too demanded Prime Minister Ehud Olmert call off the negotiations.
Rabbi Ya'akov Shapira, the head of the yeshiva, said in a teafful voice his students were taught to love the biblical Land of Israel.
'We must stop dividing it up,' he told the thousands of mourners gathered outside the building in Jerusalem's Qiryat Moshe quarter, at the city's western entrance near the road to Tel Aviv, before the dead bodies, wrapped in religious prayer shawls, were taken to their burial sites.
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