At 7: 00 on Tuesday morning, 18 November 2014, two terrorists entered the Kehillat Bnei Torah building on Harav Shimon Agassi Street
in the ultra-Orthodox Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem, which includes a synagogue and yeshiva, wielding a gun and butcher knives. They began attacking worshipers, stabbing them before opening fire. About 30 worshipers were in the midst of the morning prayers, wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries.
Police who arrived at the scene shortly after the attack began shot and killed the two terrorists.Police confirm that
four people were killed in the terror attack and eight wounded, three seriously and one critically. Two of the wounded are policemen, one in critical condition as doctors fight for his life.
The victims has been identified as:
Rabbi Moshe Twersky, 59, head of the Torat Moshe Yeshiva in Jerusalem, elder son of Rabbi Isadore Twersky of Boston, and a grandson of Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
The three other victims are
Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky, 43,
Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 68, and
Rabbi Kalman Ze'ev Levine, 55, all residents of the same street in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Hamas said on its official Al-Aqsa TV: "The attack in Jerusalem is a reaction to the crime and execution of the martyr al-Ramouni and a reaction to the crimes of the occupation. The Hamas movement is calling for more revenge attacks." Yusuf Hassan al-Ramouni, employed as a driver by the Egged bus company in Jerusalem, was found hanged at a bus terminal on Sunday night. Contrary to claims published in the Palestinian media that al-Ramouni was murdered, official autopsy results confirmed the police's suspicion of suicide.
US Secretary of State John Kerry strongly condemned the attack:
"People who had come to worship God in the sanctuary of a synagogue were hatcheted and hacked and murdered in that holy place in an act of pure terror and senseless brutality and murder. I call on the Palestinian leadership at every single level to condemn this in the most powerful terms. This violence has no place anywhere.”
"To have this kind of act, which a pure result of incitement,” is unacceptable, Kerry said, adding that Palestinian leaders “must begin to take serious steps to restrain any kind of incitement that comes from their language, other people’s language and exhibit the kind of leadership that is necessary to put this region on a different path."