Jerusalem - Large numbers of Israeli police were patrolling Jerusalem Friday, after a Palestinian gunman burst into a Jewish religious seminary in the city the previous evening and killed eight students. Police were also on high alert elsewhere in the country and set up road blocks at city entrances.
Ten other Israelis were injured in the shooting spree, seven of whom were still hospitalized, Israel Radio reported, adding three were serious but stable and one was in moderate condition.
It was the first suicide attack in Jerusalem since January 29, 2004, when 19 Israelis were killed in a bus bombing in the city. Several lawmakers called for suspending recently resumed peace negotiations.
The gunman, who was shot dead by an army officer living nearby and alerted by the gunfire, was a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who carried an Israeli identity card, the radio said.
The Palestinian entered the seminary, took a Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifle from a cardboard box and began shooting in all directions at the entrance to the library, witnesses said, adding some students hid behind book cases, while others in another room locked themselves inside, switched off the light and lay down on the floor. The students were studying Jewish religious texts when the attack happened.
Israeli police on Friday identified four of the dead as students aged 15, 16 to 18 and 19.
None of the main Palestinian militant groups claimed responsibility for the shooting.
But a previously unknown group called the Free People of the Galilee, dubbing itself the death squad of Imad Mughanyeh - the military commander of Hezbollah who was assassinated in Damascus in a car bomb blast last month - and the death squad of Gaza, claimed responsibility for the attack, according to al-Manar Hezbollah television in Beirut.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, saying he was against the killing of civilians on both sides.
But the radical Islamic Hamas movement ruling the Strip said it was a "natural reaction" against the killing of dozens of Palestinians, many of them civilians, in Israeli airstrikes and fierce ground fighting in the northern Gaza refugee camp of Jabaliya since Wednesday last week.
The incursion and airstrikes were a response to daily rocket attacks from the Strip. Abbas earlier this week suspended negotiations with Israel that were recently revived after a seven-year freeze in the peace process. But he said after meeting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he would resume the negotiations, which he called a "strategic choice."
