JERUSALEM, March 6: Eight people were killed when two armed men opened fire in a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem on Thursday.

The two men were also killed in the assault at the Merkaz Harav seminary. Israeli television said there may have been a third attacker who escaped.

In the wake of the attack, 50 ambulances raced to the area and police held back worried parents searching for children who had been attending a study session marking the start of Adar, the most festive month of the Jewish calendar.

Witnesses said the two men entered the crowded compound of the seminary and fired automatic weapons at students.

“There was a lot of gunfire and hysteria,” a woman who lives across the street from the school told the radio.

“I saw police and ordinary civilians, who were armed, trading gunfire with the gunmen,” another witness said. “The gunbattle went on for about 10 minutes.”

Outside the five-storey building, a crowd shouted “Death to the Arabs”.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian militants fired in the air to celebrate the attack, three days after Israel ended a military offensive in the Hamas-run territory that killed more than 120 Palestinians, about half of whom were identified as civilians. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas official, said the group “blesses the heroic operation in Jerusalem, which was a natural reaction to the Zionist massacre”.

A loudspeaker in Gaza City blared the message: “This is God’s vengeance.”—Reuters