Jerusalem bus shooting will exacerbate already high tensions between Israelis and Palestinians

A few hours after this attack, and Ramot Junction was getting back to normal.

The bodies had been removed, the wounded were being treated in hospital, and pools of blood had been scrubbed and washed away.

But the shockwaves will linger and reverberate. Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians are already very high, and this will only exacerbate that.

Put simply, there are those in the Israeli cabinet who believe that Israel should do everything it can to subordinate the Palestinians, including effectively annexing both Gaza and the West Bank.

Among them are Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister.

Ben-Gvir was the first minister on the scene of today's attack, standing dutifully to the side as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed some minutes later.

Ben-Gvir, an utterly uncompromising polemicist, later said that Israelis should now arm themselves in response to the attacks, that Israeli courts had been too lenient on terrorists, and that the families of the gunmen should be deported.

He and Smotrich will highlight this attack as evidence of the danger posed by those who enter Israel from the West Bank, despite the presence of checkpoints and a huge wall separating the two territories.

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But more than that, they will paint it in more binary terms - that, in their words, Israel's very existence is threatened by Palestinian terrorists, just as it is threatened by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, and various other groups.

Will Netanyahu contradict this rhetoric? No, not least because he needs the support of both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir to prop up his government, and he also knows that many in Israel back this hard-line approach.

Will he act upon it? That remains to be seen.

Last week, he delayed a cabinet discussion about annexing the West Bank, possibly because neighbouring nations told him it would be an egregious and inflammatory action.

But that was before Israeli citizens were gunned down in Jerusalem.

This is not the first terrorist attack in Jerusalem, and it won't be the last. But it has poured more petrol on a fire that was already burning fiercely.

We don't know what will happen next. But something will.

(c) Sky News 2025: Jerusalem bus shooting will exacerbate already high tensions between Israelis and Palestinians<