JERUSALEM (AP) – Secretary of State John Kerry made his first trip to Israel in more than a year, arriving on Tuesday in the midst of a new rash of deadly attacks that have dampened hopes for peace mediation between the Jewish state and Palestinians during the Obama administration’s final year. The visit includes no such ambitious agenda, the chief U.S. diplomat conceded, and is primarily focused on ending the terror.
Kerry will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, before traveling to the West Bank for discussions with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The script is well-trodden, with Kerry likely to ask both sides to avoid provocative actions. For the Israelis, that means holding off on construction of new settlements in lands the Palestinians seek for their future state. For the Palestinians, it means ending incitement of violence.
Ahead of Kerry’s trip, a Palestinian on Monday fatally stabbed an Israeli soldier at a West Bank gas station before security forces killed him. Two teenage Palestinian girls attacked a 70-year-old Palestinian in Jerusalem, apparently mistaking him for an Israeli. The Israeli military said a knife-wielding Palestinian was shot dead before he could harm anyone. And a Palestinian rammed his vehicle into a pedestrian near a West Bank settlement, lightly wounding him.
Amid so much violence, Kerry said “there’s no highfalutin, grandiose, hidden agenda here.” He told reporters traveling with him in the Middle East on Monday that he sought steps “that could calm things down a little bit so people aren’t living in absolute, daily terror that they might be stabbed or driven into or shot trying to walk around their city.”
The violence began in mid-September over tensions surrounding a sensitive Jerusalem holy site, before spreading across Israel and into Palestinian territories. Nineteen Israelis have been killed, mostly in stabbings. Israeli fire has killed 89 Palestinians. Israel says 57 of these were attackers, while the rest died in clashes with security forces.