Palestinian gunmen kill four Israelis in West Bank

Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis and wounded four others in an attack near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Tuesday’s attack was the deadliest against Israelis since a shooting at a settlement in East Jerusalem in January and came a day after Israeli forces killed six Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, during a raid on the city. More than 90 were injured. of Jenin which turned into a gun battle that lasted several hours.

Israeli medics said one of four people wounded in the shooting near Eli, a settlement north of the Palestinian city of Ramallah, was in serious condition and all were being taken to hospitals in Israel.

Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls the blockaded Gaza Strip, said the shooting was a reaction to Israeli “crimes” at the Jenin refugee camp (on Monday), but stopped short of claiming responsibility.

Israel’s military said that one of the men involved in the attack was “neutralized” by a civilian and the other was “neutralized” by security forces after fleeing in a stolen car. It said both were “affiliated” with Hamas.

The latest bloodshed comes after 18 months of escalating violence in the West Bank that has fueled fears that the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be heading for a wider escalation.

This year is already shaping up to be the bloodiest in more than a decade in the West Bank, where Israeli forces have been conducting almost nightly raids since attacks by Palestinians on Israelis last spring.

Israeli forces have killed 114 Palestinians in the West Bank so far this year, while Palestinians have killed 16 Israelis, according to UN figures, which do not include the most recent violence. The Palestinians want the West Bank as the heart of a future state, but Israel has occupied it since 1967.

The bloodshed has sparked calls from hardliners in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – which last year pledged to take a tougher stance against Palestinians with ultranationalists in key security posts – for the army to take a more aggressive stance in the West Bank.

During Monday’s raid in Jenin – in which Israel deployed helicopter gunships to the West Bank for the first time since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, ended in 2005 – Israel’s ultranationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on the government to launch a “sweeping operation”. sought to. In area.

After the shooting on Tuesday, Netanyahu said that “all options are open.” In a statement, he said, “We will continue to fight terrorism with all our might and we will defeat it.”

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry branded the Israeli assault on Jenin “a dangerous escalation that will drag the region into more bloodshed” and appealed to the international community to intervene “immediately and urgently”.

There have been no serious peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership since 2014, and CIA chief Bill Burns warned earlier this year that the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories was “too sad for (some) of the realities” during the second Equality is” Intifada.