Israeli military says it intercepted rocket fired from Gaza Strip

A salvo of rockets is fired from Gaza City toward Israel in August last year. AFP

A rocket was fired towards Israel from the Gaza Strip and intercepted by Israeli aerial defences on Saturday, the military said.

Sirens sounded in Israeli border communities, sending people to shelters.

Also on Saturday, an eight-year-old boy died of his injuries from an attack on a bus stop in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem that killed his brother, a hospital said.

It takes the total killed to three after the incident on Friday in Ramot, a Jewish settlement neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.

“Eight-year-old Asher Menahem Paley, who was seriously injured in the Ramot attack, has died,” Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek hospital said in a statement.

“He arrived in critical condition … many teams from the trauma unit, emergency, paediatric intensive care, paediatric surgery and neurosurgery fought for many hours for his life.”

The other victims were Asher's younger brother, Yaakov Yisrael Paley, aged six, and 20-year-old Alter Shlomo Lederman, a yeshiva student.

Four others were injured in the attack, including the father of the two boys, who remains in hospital, and another son, aged 10, according to medics and Israeli media.

Police said that at around 1:30 pm (1130 GMT) on Friday, the driver of the car, a 31-year-old resident of Issawiya, a Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, hit “at high speed … innocent people waiting at the bus stop”.

The suspected attacker was “neutralised on the spot”.

Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war and later annexed it in a move not recognised by the international community.

This year, in addition to the deaths from the attack on Friday, at least 43 Palestinians — including attackers, militants and civilians — have been killed.

Nine Israeli civilians including three children, and one Ukrainian have been killed over the same period, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.

Friday's attack followed a week of violence in the West Bank.

On Thursday, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian near the city of Hebron, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, after what the army called a “stabbing attack”.

On Tuesday, troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager in the city of Nablus, the Health Ministry said, with the Israeli military saying he had fired on soldiers.

A day earlier, Israeli forces killed five suspected Palestinian gunmen in a raid in Jericho, after a days-long search for suspects in a shooting at a restaurant.

Late last month, a shooter killed six Israelis and a Ukrainian outside a synagogue in East Jerusalem, a day after the deadliest Israeli army raid in years in the occupied West Bank claimed 10 lives.

The synagogue attack on the Jewish Sabbath was the deadliest targeting Israeli civilians in more than a decade.

— With reporting from agencies