Palestinian Driver Injures 17 Israeli Troops

A Palestinian driver crashed his car into a group of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem late last night, injuring 17 people in what Israeli police described as a terror attack. The driver was immediately shot dead.

Two of the injured were seriously hurt, while the rest had light or moderate injuries, police said.

The soldiers, from the artillery corps, were on a late-night tour of Jerusalem ahead of the Jewish new year next week. The officer, a lieutenant, was part of the tour group.

The incident happened at a large crossroads between East and West Jerusalem, very close to the walls of the old city. The car, a black BMW, ended up on the pavement, crashed into a wall. The front and back windows were shot out in the gunfire after first the army officer and then a policeman fired at the driver, who was shot 11 times.

Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, said: "We can confirm it was a terror attack. The man was shot and killed."

The driver was a Palestinian, reportedly from al-Farouk, in East Jerusalem. Like most East Jerusalem Palestinians, he carried an Israeli identity card. His car had yellow Israeli number plates.

The driver's family was reported today as saying that the man, a 19-year-old named as Qassem al-Mughrabi, did not have a driver's license and was agitated after the refusal of a marriage proposal. His family said the incident had been an accident, not an attack.

But Elad Amar, 23, the Israeli army lieutenant who shot the driver, told Israel Radio the car had been heading directly at the soldiers. "I didn't see his face, just the car as it neared us," he said. "He ran into them. They flew into the air, some landing on the hood - people you were laughing with, joking with just a moment before."

The incident will once more bring calls from some Israelis for the destruction of the houses of Palestinians involved in attacks in Israel. Ehud Barak, the defence minister, promptly released a statement demanding that legal procedures to allow house demolitions be sped up "to contribute to deterring potential terrorists".

But such a move would be controversial, the Israeli supreme court having ruled in the past that such demolitions, which were once a regular Israeli tactic, do not prevent attacks, and should be halted.

In recent months, Palestinians from East Jerusalem have been involved in a series of high-profile attacks in Jerusalem. In March, a gunman walked into a Jewish religious seminary and shot dead eight students. In July a construction worker drove a bulldozer down a main street in the city, killing three people and injuring 44 others. And later that same month, another man drove a bulldozer down a busy street, ramming cars and injuring 16 people. All three Palestinians were shot dead at the scenes of the attacks.