Two suspected Palestinian men armed with axes and knives killed four people and wounded four in a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday before they were shot dead by police, Israeli media said, the worst such attack in years.<br /><br />A spokesman for Israel’s ambulance service told Army Radio medics were treating nine people, five of them critically wounded. Israel’s Zaka emergency response team said there were a number of fatalities at the scene.<br /><br />Israeli media said four or five people had been killed.<br /><br />“We are viewing this as a terrorist attack,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. Media reports said one of the attackers was armed with a gun.<br /><br />Violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has surged over the past few weeks.<br /><br />Five Israelis and a foreign visitor have been deliberately run over and killed or stabbed to death by Palestinians in the past month. About a dozen Palestinians have also been killed, including those accused of carrying out those attacks.<br /><br />Residents trace the violence in Jerusalem back to July, when a Palestinian teenager was burned to death by Jewish assailants, an alleged revenge attack for the abduction and killing of three Jewish teens by Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank.<br /><br />The summer war in Gaza and a row over access to a Jerusalem compound sacred to Muslims and Jews alike have also been triggers for violence.<br /><br />(Reuters)
