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Gunman Kills Eight at Seminary in Jerusalem
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Police chief Aharon Franco said that at about 8:30 p.m., the shooter walked into the seminary with an AK-47 assault rifle hidden in a box.
The eight people killed were rabbinical students in their late teens or 20s, police said.
"This terrorist attack is a severe blow, after which no state can remain silent," said Zvi Katzover, a settler leader and graduate of the seminary, which has about 700 students and is in the western Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe.
"The government has to immediately stop building the terrorist state," he said, referring to the Palestinian Authority, "and has to enable the establishment of new settlements and expand the existing ones."
The attack was reminiscent of an earlier instance of a gunman killing people at prayer: In 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein shot dead 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron before he himself was killed.
Outside the seminary Thursday night, hundreds of ultra-orthodox Israelis chanted "Death to the Arabs!" as Israeli forces conducted a room-to-room search of the building, looking for other perpetrators after rumors circulated that the gunman had not acted alone. Police later determined he probably had.
Also outside the seminary were nervous parents, furiously trying to reach their sons by cellphone.
Moshe Harel said his 15-year-old son was inside the school at the time of the attack, but was not hurt. "My wife called and told me something was going on at the yeshiva," Harel said. "It took half an hour before I could get ahold of him. It was terrifying."
But Harel was not surprised by what happened. "It's a long war," he said. "It didn't start today. It won't end tomorrow."
Others said the attack was proof that Israel needs to act to defend itself, even if it does so reluctantly.
"If they didn't attack us, we wouldn't attack them back," said Chaim Schur, a 19-year-old rabbinical student who stood across the street from the seminary Thursday night, watching paramedics dashing in and out. "We just want to stop. We don't want to go on killing kids in Gaza. It's not our fault."
The attack shook residents of Jerusalem, which has not experienced an attack of similar magnitude since 2004. Within minutes of Thursday's killings, people who had been out at restaurants and bars began anxiously huddling around television sets and radios to get the latest news.
The deadliest attack in Israel in recent years was in April 2006, when 11 people were killed in a suicide strike at a falafel stand in Tel Aviv.
Thursday's attack came on the same day that an Israeli soldier was killed during operations on the border with Gaza. An Israeli strike Thursday night in Gaza killed four members of Islamic Jihad, the group that asserted responsibility for killing the soldier.
Special correspondents Samuel Sockol and Hillary Zaken in Jerusalem and Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza City, and staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
