Special to WorldTribune.com

JERUSALEM — Israeli police have been ordered to demonstrate restraint amid Arab riots in Jerusalem.

Security sources said thousands of Israeli police were deployed in Arab
neighborhoods of Jerusalem sabotaged by rioters. They said police commanders
told their forces not to stop young Arabs from destroying public property or
hurling stones at Jews.

“The orders they’ve received is to do nothing unless there is imminent
danger,” a source said. “The hope is that this will die down.”

The riots began around July 3 in wake of the killing of an Arab teenager
from Jerusalem’s northern neighborhood of Shuafat. The Palestinian Authority
has blamed Israel for the killing, but police said there is no evidence that
Israelis or Jews were involved.

“We demand that Israel expose the criminals and bring them to justice,”
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesman of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, said.

During the riots, in which flags of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
were unfurled, Arab gangs were said to have attacked rivals in Shuafat.
Police intervened and stopped an assault on an unidentified young man.

“The police, very intelligently, are trying to deploy forces in large
groups, so that policemen won’t get caught in a dangerous situation that
would force them to shoot live bullets at rioters, causing bloodshed that
would reignite the clashes,” Israeli military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai said.

So far, the rioters destroyed the light railway in northern Jerusalem.
Most of the stations in Arab neighborhoods were torched as hundreds of
rioters tried to attack nearby Jewish neighborhoods. Clashes between police
and demonstrators were also reported in several Israeli cities.

“I don’t see a third uprising here,” Israeli Internal Security Minister
Yitzhak Aharonovitch said.

At the same time, Israel’s military has been engaged in a missile war
with the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Hamas and other crews were said to have
fired nearly 100 missiles and rockets over 48 hours. Two were intercepted by
Israel’s Iron Dome missile and rocket defense system.

“We must respond to rocket fire on Beersheba just as we would to rockets
at Tel Aviv, and not wait for rockets to hit Tel Aviv,” Economy Minister
Naftali Bennett said.

  Israeli police under restraint order in hopes ‘this will die down’, Mahmoud Abbas, Shuafat, Yitzhak Aharanovitch