A Palestinian motorist rammed his vehicle into a group of Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint on Tuesday, wounding three, the military said, as US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for his first visit in more than a year on a mission to try and calm two months of deadly violence.
Kerry touched down amid a new rash of deadly attacks that have dampened any lingering hopes of renewed peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians during the Obama administration’s final year.
Kerry conceded his visit had none of the ambitious agendas of past trips and was primarily focused on stemming the violence.
The violence erupted in mid-September over tensions surrounding a sensitive Jerusalem holy site and quickly spread across Israel and into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Over this period, 19 Israelis have been killed, mostly in stabbings, while 89 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire. Of them, 57 are said by Israel to be attackers and the rest were killed in clashes.
The past week has been the deadliest thus far.
A Palestinian fatally stabbed an Israeli soldier at a West Bank gas station Monday before being killed along with two other Palestinian attackers. Five people were killed in stabbing and shooting attacks last Thursday, including Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year-old American from Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts.
Kerry lamented Schwartz’s death as “another young life cut short.”
“It happens almost every day over there and it’s terrible, and too many Israelis have been killed and stabbed, and too many Palestinians,” he told reporters traveling with him in the Middle East on Monday. “And there’s no excuse for any of the violence. There’s just no rationale.”
Amid so much violence, Kerry said “there’s no highfalutin, grandiose, hidden agenda here.”
He said he sought steps “that could calm things down a little bit so people aren’t living in absolute, daily terror that they might be stabbed or driven into or shot trying to walk around their city.”
The attacks renewed Tuesday as Kerry landed in Israel.
The Israeli military said a Palestinian motorist rammed the soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint, lightly wounding three of them. It said the attacker was shot and wounded at the scene.
Kerry will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials before traveling to the West Bank for discussions with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The script is well-trodden, with Kerry likely to ask both sides to avoid provocative actions. For the Israelis, that means holding off on construction of new settlements in lands the Palestinians seek for their future state. For the Palestinians, it means ending incitement to violence.
Kerry has visited Israel and the Palestinian territories only once since the collapse in April 2014 of a nine-month peace process he led. He traveled back three months later during warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.