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SOBBING and wailing filled the air today as thousands of people gathered in Jerusalem for funerals of teenagers killed by a Palestinian gunman at a religious school the previous night.

Mourners crowded under sunny skies in front of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, where eight students were gunned down late yesterday by a Palestinian gunman, the bloodiest attack in the Holy City in four years.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” one of the school`s rabbis asked, quoting from Psalm 22.

Many in the crowd of teenagers in T-shirts and jeans, Orthodox men in black suits and hats and grey-bearded Jewish elders broke down in tears.

Some listened quietly, others turned their faces to the sky and wailed, while yet others rocked back and forth in prayer, their long side curls swaying beneath embroidered kippas.

Another rabbi asked of the crowd: “Who will avenge them? God will avenge them.”

A third rabbi counselled calm as he sought to soothe the mourners, saying “the blood spilled should push us to study more”.

The victims – most of them 15 or 16 years old – were killed and another nine wounded when a Palestinian from east Jerusalem entered the building and started firing, police said.

The attacker was shot dead by law enforcement forces.

The yeshiva is widely known as the centre of Israeli religious nationalism, where the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faith) settler movement was born after the 1967 Six Day War.

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