Gas station which was set on fire
Gas station which was set on fireEli spokesmanship

Police are suspecting arson may have been involved, after a fire broke out Friday evening at a self service gas station on Highway 60, near the community of Eli in the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, north of Jerusalem.

The gas station, which is located on one of the main traffic arteries in Judea and Samaria, is accessible to both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Firefighters who were called to the scene extinguished the flames and there were no injuries.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation but, according to the Walla! Hebrew-language news website, eyewitnesses said they saw a Palestinian vehicle entering the station and setting it on fire before fleeing the scene.

Channel 2 News reported that police continue to investigate those claims and that they have yet to be verified.

There have been tensions in the area in recent days, particularly since the arson attack on the Palestinian Arab village of Duma, which groups such as Hamas and Fatah have threatened to avenge.

Overnight Thursday, Arab terrorists threw a firebomb at the Nof Shmuel Jewish building in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina in Jerusalem.

Miraculously, while the occupants of Nof Shmuel were sleeping inside their home as it was being firebombed, no one was injured. One of their vehicles was badly damaged, however. 

On Wednesday, three Jews were beaten brutally by dozens of Arabs near Atarot, after one Arab driver's road rage snowballed into a lynch mob.

Within minutes, police arrived; they had apparently been alerted to the sequence of events by another driver. The Arabs fled the scene before they could be apprehended, in the direction of Qalandiya, an Arab village just west of the boundary line of Jerusalem in the direction of Ramallah.

Last week, 27-year-old Inbar Azrak was injured in a firebomb attack on her car at Jerusalem’s Beit Hanina intersection.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)