Palestinian stabs rabbi in Arab East Jerusalem

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian stabbed an Israeli rabbi in Arab East Jerusalem on Tuesday, emergency services said, in an attack likely to further increase already high tensions in the city.

The rabbi, 49, was stabbed in the neck but his wounds did not appear to be life-threatening, ambulance workers said.

The Zaka emergency service said he was walking with a bodyguard in Jerusalem's walled Old City, where his seminary is located, when he was attacked. The bodyguard gave chase but the attacker escaped, leaving behind a blood-stained knife.

Amending preliminary information that had pointed to two attackers, a police spokesman said a single Palestinian had stabbed the rabbi.

The spokesman described the incident, near the Old City's Damascus Gate, a busy area of Palestinian shops and cafes, as politically motivated.

Tensions have been high in Jerusalem since a Palestinian gunman killed eight students at a Jewish seminary in the city on March 6.

On Sunday, dozens of right-wing Israeli activists hurled stones at cars and houses in the Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem where the gunman, who was killed by an off-duty army officer during the assault on the seminary, had lived.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing it in the 1967 Middle East and considers all of the city its capital, a claim that has not been recognized internationally.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City and holy sites at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict, to be the capital of the state they aspire to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

(Reporting by Avida Landau, Writing by Jeffrey Heller, Editing by Sami Aboudi)