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 Palestinian officials condemned the security measures - the most
serious clampdown in the Jerusalem area since a Palestinian uprising
a decade ago - as collective punishment.
Israel's security cabinet had authorized the crackdown hours earlier
in an overnight session after Palestinians armed with knives and a
gun killed three Israelis and wounded several others on Tuesday.
Seven Israelis and 30 Palestinians, including children and
assailants, have been killed in two weeks of bloodshed in Israel,
Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
The violence has been partly triggered by Palestinians' anger over
what they see as increased Jewish encroachment on Jerusalem's
Al-Aqsa mosque compound, also revered by Jews as the site of two
destroyed Jewish temples.
There is also deep-seated frustration with the failure of years of
peace efforts to achieve Palestinian statehood and end Israeli
settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
 Israeli paramilitary border police used their vehicles to block an
exit at the edge of Jabel Mukabar, an East Jerusalem neighborhood
and home to three Palestinians who carried out deadly attacks
against Israelis on Tuesday.
Policemen carried out body searches and examined the identity papers
of Palestinian motorists. Cars were then allowed to leave.
Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem carry the same identity
papers as Israelis and unlike brethren in the West Bank can travel
throughout Israel.
Dimitrii Delliani, an official in Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas's Fatah movement, said closing entrances to Palestinian
neighborhoods was "collective punishment in violation of all
international law".
"(Israeli) cabinet decisions will not stop the Intifada (uprising).
People of resistance do not fear new security restrictions," Hussam
Badrawn, a spokesman for the militant Hamas group in the West Bank
said.
"ON PRECIPICE"
The government said the immediate aim was to stem stabbings and
other attacks by Arab assailants, many of whom resided in
Jerusalem's eastern sectors.
One Israeli official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity
said Palestinian neighborhoods would not be sealed off completely,
describing the measure as "loose encirclement".
Israel regards all Jerusalem, including the predominantly Arab east
captured and annexed in 1967, as its "indivisible capital" - a claim
that is not recognized internationally - and its right-wing
government is wary as being portrayed as dividing the city.
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"No one is going to lock down East Jerusalem," Israeli Justice
Minister Ayelet Shaked said on Army Radio.
At a Jerusalem bus stop where a Palestinian from Jabel Mukabar
stabbed and killed an Israeli man on Tuesday before being shot dead,
an Israeli woman sounded a defiant note.
"They want us to be afraid so we have to do the opposite," said the
woman, who identified herself only as Jana.
Merchants in predominantly Jewish west Jerusalem reported a sharp
drop-off in the number of shoppers.
"You can see it's almost empty here ... but we are (in Jerusalem),
so we had even worse periods in the past," resident Avinoam Avganim
said on usually busy Jaffa Road, the scene of several of the dozens
of Palestinian suicide bombings that rocked the city during the
2000-2005 uprising.
At a late-night meeting of his security cabinet that finished in the
early hours of Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also
allowed revocation of residency rights of Palestinians deemed to
have committed "terrorism" and a step-up in the demolition of homes
of people who carry out attacks.
The cabinet also approved an expansion of the national police, extra
guards on public transport and the deployment of army units in
"sensitive areas" along the steel and concrete barrier that
separates the West Bank.
Police said 300 soldiers had been placed under their command and
they had begun deploying as part of the new security measures.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he would travel to the
region to try and ease tensions "and see if we can't move that away
from this precipice," Kerry said.
(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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