Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement, claimed responsibility on Friday for the shooting attack in Jerusalem the previous evening in which a local gunman killed eight students at a Jewish religious school.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli government, which mounted a major offensive in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip last week but which pledged after Thursday's shooting to push on with peace negotiations with Hamas’s secular rivals in the West Bank.
“The Hamas movement announces its full responsibility for the Jerusalem operation,” a Hamas official said in Gaza. “The movement will release the details at a later stage,” he added. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
After the bloodiest attack in Israel in two years and the first in Jerusalem in four, Israel clamped down on the city and the occupied West Bank. Thousands attended funerals for the victims, aged 15 to 26.