Teenager killed and 19 wounded in Jerusalem explosions

A teenage boy was was killed and 19 people wounded in two explosions at bus stops at separate entrances to Jerusalem on Wednesday.

The twin blasts occurred within half an hour of each other at the start of the morning rush hour when the bus stops were full of people.

Police believe bags with explosives packed with nails to cause maximum damage were left close to the bus stops and detonated by mobile phones in a well-planned operation carried out by an organised terror cell.

The victim was a 16-year-old Israeli-Canadian yeshiva religious seminary student who was buried in Jerusalem on Wednesday afternoon.

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No group claimed responsibility but both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad praised the bombings.

Although militant groups have carried out stabbings, car rammings and shootings in recent years, bomb attacks have become very rare since the end of a Palestinian uprising nearly two decades ago.

Israel raised its security alert and Israel’s army chief cut short a visit to the US.

Outgoing Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid vowed that Israel would capture the perpetrators. “They can run, they can hide – it won’t help them. The security forces will reach them,” he said. “If they resist, they will be eliminated. If not, we will punish them to the fullest extent of the law.”

The European Union condemned the terror attack and expressed concern “about the dangerous escalation of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory”.

The attacks came as prime minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud party continued negotiations to form a new coalition government with far-right and religious parties following elections earlier this month.

Leader of the far-right Religious Zionist party Bezalel Smotrich called on Mr Netanyahu to form a government without delay. “Arab terrorism is at our doorstep, we have to form a government as soon as possible,” he said.

Just before the Jerusalem bombings, armed Palestinian gunmen seized the body of a 17-year-old Israeli from a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin.

The youth, a member of the Arabic-speaking Druze minority in Israel, was taken to the hospital after a serious car accident but when militants realised he was an Israeli some 20 armed gunmen stormed the facility and seized the body.

Relatives who were in the hospital managed to escape and return safely to Israel. They claim the boy was still alive when the militants took him and disconnected him from a ventilator.

It is believed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a rogue group loosely affiliated with president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, are holding the body. They want Israel to release Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and return the bodies of Palestinian militants in return for freeing the body.

Israel is holding talks with the Palestinian Authority and United Nations representatives to retrieve the body but has threatened to conduct a military incursion into the Jenin refugee camp if the negotiations fail.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli army gunfire on Tuesday night in clashes in Nablus.