Two Palestinians shot dead after stabbing, car ramming

Occupied Jerusalem: Israeli security forces shot dead two Palestinians in separate incidents on Friday in occupied Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, police and the military said, as a wave of heightened violence persisted into its fifth month.
In occupied Jerusalem, a Palestinian man stabbed two police officers outside the walled Old City before they opened fire and killed him, police said.
A few hours later, in the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian man tried to ram his car into a group of Israeli soldiers who then shot him dead, the military said.
Since October, stabbings, shootings and car rammings by Palestinians have killed 28 Israelis and a US citizen. Israeli security forces have killed at least 165 Palestinians, 109 of whom Israel says were attackers, while most others were shot dead during violent anti-Israeli protests.
The bloodshed has raised concern of wider escalation a decade after the last Palestinian uprising subsided.
Briefing the UN Security Council on Thursday, Nickolay Mladenov, the UN envoy on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, said he was concerned the bloodshed may be entering "a new troubling phase".
Mladenov called on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to provide "a political horizon to their people" and reject incitement by what he called radicals in their own camps.
Tensions have been stoked by various factors including a dispute over occupied Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque compound and the failure of several rounds of peace talks to secure the Palestinians an independent state in Israeli-occupied territory.
Palestinian leaders have said that with no breakthrough on the horizon, desperate youngsters see no future ahead. Israel says young Palestinians are being incited to violence by their leaders and by hardline groups calling for Israel's destruction.
Security officials have also pointed to economic hardship and social media as playing a role in triggering attacks. Many Palestinian attackers have been teenagers.
On Thursday two Palestinian 14-year-olds stabbed and killed an Israeli in a supermarket in the occupied West Bank before an armed civilian shot and wounded the teens, who were taken for treatment to Israeli hospitals in occupied Jerusalem.