US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said the rocket attacks from Gaza against Israel should stop “immediately,” and he urged all sides to take steps to de-escalate the situation.
“I am deeply concerned about the rocket attacks,” Blinken said in brief remarks ahead of his meeting with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi at the State Department. Safadi also said the focus was to ensure escalation stopped.
Safadi said, “The United States has a leading role to play. It has the leading role to play, in fact, in terms of trying to bring about the peace and stability that we all want.”
Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets toward the Jerusalem area and southern Israel on Monday, carrying out a threat to punish Israel for violent confrontations with Palestinians in Jerusalem.
The Gaza health ministry said nine Palestinians, including three children, were killed “in a series of strikes in northern Gaza”. It did not explicitly blame Israel for the deaths, in an area that has been a staging ground for militants’ cross-border rocket attacks.
As Israel celebrated “Jerusalem Day” earlier on Monday, marking its capture of eastern sections of the holy city in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, violence erupted at the mosque, Islam’s third most sacred site.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said more than 300 Palestinians were injured in clashes with police who fired rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas in the compound, which is also revered by Jews at the site of biblical temples.
In an effort to defuse tensions, police changed the route of a traditional Jerusalem Day march, in which thousands of Israeli flag-waving Jewish youth walk through the Old City. They entered through Jaffa Gate, bypassing the Damascus Gate outside the Muslim quarter, which has been a flashpoint in recent weeks.
Police rushed the marchers to cover at Jaffa Gate after the sirens went off.
Israel views all of Jerusalem as its capital, including the eastern part that it annexed after the 1967 war in a move that has not won international recognition.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a state they seek in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
