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Israeli policemen check Palestinian youths in the Old City of Jerusalem on Sunday in response to recent stabbings in the area.Ahmad Gharabli/AFP / Getty Images

Palestinians in Jerusalem, more than one-third of the city's population, have awoken to a new reality: Israeli troops are encircling Arab neighbourhoods, blocking roads with concrete cubes the size of washing machines and ordering some of those leaving on foot to lift their shirts to show they are not carrying knives.

The unprecedented clampdown is meant to halt a rash of stabbings of Israelis. Many of the attacks were carried out by residents of east Jerusalem, the sector captured and annexed by Israel in 1967 and claimed by Palestinians as a future capital.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has portrayed the measures as temporary, in line with what his advisers say any police department in the United States or Europe would do to quell urban unrest. But some allege he is dividing Jerusalem, something Mr. Netanyahu has said he would never do.

Arab residents, who have long complained of discriminatory Israeli policies, say the latest closures are driving them to a boiling point and will trigger more violence.

"They want to humiliate us," said Taher Obeid, a 26-year-old janitor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He spoke over the din of car horns, as drivers stuck at one of the new checkpoints vented their anger.

In the past month, nine Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks and 41 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israelis, including 20 labelled as attackers.

On Sunday, an Arab man armed with a gun and a knife opened fire at a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba, police said. One Israeli soldier was killed and 10 people wounded in one of the boldest attacks yet in a month-long wave of violence.

Domestic critics say Mr. Netanyahu – long opposed to any negotiated partition of Jerusalem into two capitals – is effectively dividing the city along ethnic lines with his security measures.

"The great patriots … who don't go to bed at night before praying for a unified, undivided, greater Jerusalem, are now proposing to dissect it, divide it and return it back 48 years in time," commentator Nehemiah Strassler wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Some warn that recent events – a rise in "lone wolf" attacks by Palestinians and Israeli crackdowns – offer a taste of the constant hate-filled skirmishes that would likely prevail for years if there's no deal on setting up a Palestinian state next to Israel.

They say that due to the growth of Israeli settlements, the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River has effectively become a binational entity, with Israel ruling over several million Palestinians.

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