Jordan on Saturday condemned the killing of one of its nationals by an Israeli policewoman he allegedly attacked in east Jerusalem, calling it a "barbaric act".
Israeli police claimed that the officer shot dead 28-year-old Saeed Amro on Friday after he tried to stab her at the Damascus Gate, the main entrance used by Palestinians to enter Jerusalem's Old City.
A spokeswoman for the Jordanian foreign ministry denounced "the barbaric act of the army of the Israeli occupation, whose premeditated shooting of the Jordanian Saeed Amro... killed him on the spot".
"Amro was part of a group of tourists who had entered the Palestinian territories on Thursday to visit Jerusalem," Sabah Refai said.
Many Palestinians hold Jordanian passports, and Israeli police said on Friday they were checking if Amro also had Palestinian papers.
But a Jordanian official source told AFP that he was not Palestinian.
Amro was one of three alleged assailants killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis on Friday, Israeli security forces said.
It was the latest incident in an almost one-year long surge of Israeli-on-Palestinian deadly repression met with violent responses by Palestinians against settlers and Israeli soldiers.
Since the start of October, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least 228 Palestinians. Meanwhile, almost daily stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks by frustrated and unarmed Palestinians have killed 34 Israelis and a US citizen.
Settlement-building, racial discrimination, confiscation of identity cards, long queues at checkpoints, as well as daily clashes and the desecration of Al-Aqsa mosque, describe Palestinians' daily suffering.
The anger of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem has increased in the last three years after the Israeli authorities allowed increasing numbers of Jewish settlers to storm the Al-Aqsa mosque.
The year-old surge in violence has been fuelled by Palestinians' frustration over Israel's 48-year occupation of land they seek for an independent state, and the expansion of settlements in those territories which were captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Palestinian leaders say a younger generation sees no hope for the future living under Israeli security restrictions and with a stifled economy. The latest round of U.S.-brokered peace talks collapsed in April 2014.
Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994.
*The story edited by Ahram Onlie.
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