Brooklyn man among five Americans shot in Israel says it’s ‘the safest place in the world’

Crown Heights resident was visiting Jerusalem on birthright trip

A Brooklyn man who was among five Americans injured in a shooting attack on worshippers in Jerusalem has stressed that Israel is still “the safest place in the world”.

Menachem Palace told N12, an Israeli TV station, that he still believed Israel was “the safest place in the world” despite being targeted in what the US State Department has labelled a “terror attack” on Sunday.

“The trip ends on Thursday and I plan to stay,” the 22-year-old resident of Brooklyn, New York, told the TV station, in comments reported on by COLive. “This is our land – the safest place in the world”.

The Crown Heights resident was among five US citizens confirmed wounded in a shooting on a bus near the Western Wall, a holy sight in Jerusalem popular with Jewish, Muslim and Christian pilgrims.

A group of worshippers had been returning from the Western Wall on Sunday morning when the bus driver said shots rang-out.

“We opened the ramp for someone on a wheelchair, and then the shooting started,” Daniel Kanyevsk told Israeli news outlets, according to ABC News. “Everyone got down on the floor, screaming. I tried to escape, but the bus couldn’t drive with the ramp open.”

A 30-year-old pregnant woman and a 60-year-old man were among the other victims and remain in critical condition, reports said.

“I didn’t feel anything,” Mr Palace told Israeli TV after being shot in the back. “Maybe it was the adrenaline. But they took an x-ray and saw there was a bullet. They performed minor surgery and Baruch Hashem everything is good. It was really a miracle.”

While there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the shooting, Israeli authorities said the suspect later turned himself in. Israeli media reportedly identified the gunman as a Palestinian from east Jerusalem and no further information about the individual was released on Sunday.

The attack came a week after several children were reported to be among at least 47 civilians and Palestinian fighters killed by airstrikes over the Gaza Strip. Sixteen people were reportedly killed by Palestinian rockets that fell short.

More than 1,000 rockets were fired by the militant Islamic Jihad Movement into Israeli in retaliation for the airstrikes, marking the worst hostilities between the two sides in a year.

In a statement on Sunday night, the US State Department said it “strongly condemns the terrorist attack” and confirmed that five US citizens, believed to be almost all from New York, were among the wounded.

Reports said the group had been visiting Israel as part of a trip organised by Birthright Israel, a charity that sponsors free trips for young adults of Jewish heritage to Israel.

Additional reporting by Reuters.

This article was amended on 6 September 2022 to include the fact that 16 of the Palestinians killed in the airstrikes reportedly died as a result of Palestinian rockets that fell short of their intended targets.