JERUSALEM — A man concealing an assault rifle and handgun in a box slipped into a cherished Jewish seminary here and opened fire in the library Thursday night, killing eight people in the deadliest attack in Israel in nearly two years.
Witnesses said the assault lasted more than 10 minutes before a seminary student and an off-duty army officer killed the gunman, identified by police as a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem.
Nine people were wounded in the shooting spree, which felled Orthodox religious scholars at their tables and left trails of blood from the library to a stairwell where some managed to escape. Most of the victims were in their teens and 20s, rescue workers said.
The target of the attack was the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, a Zionist symbol that one rabbi called a "spiritual-ideological power station" allied with the Jewish settlement movement. Settlements are major sources of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, who want the entire West Bank, along with eastern Jerusalem, for a future state.
"I heard gunshots coming from outside and then the terrorist entered the library," said a young man identifying himself as Yehuda, one of about 80 students trapped in the library with the killer.
"We took cover behind the bookshelves," Yehuda told Israel Radio. "He started shooting. I saw people hit and I ran."
"There were youngsters 16 and 17 years old lying on the floor covered in blood still holding books in their hands," said Yaron Tzuker, a paramedic.
Hezbollah's Al Manar television in Lebanon reported a claim of responsibility for the attack by a previously unknown group, the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyah and Gaza. Mughniyah, a top Hezbollah commander, was killed Feb. 12 by a car bomb in Syria that Hezbollah blamed on Israel.
The Islamic movement Hamas praised the Thursday attack as "heroic" but stopped short of claiming a role in it. In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets to celebrate, firing rifles in the air. A loudspeaker on a Gaza City street echoed the Hamas message: "This is God's vengeance."
Hamas and other militant groups had vowed retribution for a recent five-day Israeli army incursion against rocket-launching operations in Gaza that left more than 120 people dead, many of them civilians.
Earlier Thursday, an Israeli soldier was killed when militants detonated a bomb near his vehicle as it was patrolling on the Israeli side of the Gaza border. Israeli airstrikes killed five militants in Gaza during the day.
