The Israeli military has shot and killed two Palestinians who allegedly opened fire at troops from their car in the northern West Bank, authorities said.
It is the latest incident in a wave of deadly violence gripping the occupied territory.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the two men killed in the West Bank village of Deir al Hatab on Tuesday as Saud Abdullah Saud and Mohammed Abu Dira.
The Israeli military said the men shot at an Israeli outpost near the settlement of Elon Moreh, south of the Palestinian city of Nablus. Israeli soldiers on patrol opened fire, killing the two men. Palestinian media said a third gunmen was in the car during the drive-by shooting and fled the area.
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Israeli security forces said they were searching for other suspected assailants and found a pair of M-16 rifles and a pistol at the scene.
The local armed group of the Balata refugee camp, a militant stronghold near Nablus, identified the two men as militants, sharing photographs of them brandishing M-16s and posing together in the camp.
Saud had previously spent 15 years in Israeli prison, the group said. “We fought as soldiers and we promise we will always be soldiers,” Saud told reporters after being freed from prison last spring in a video widely circulated online.
The deaths follow a week of unusually heightened violence in Israel and the West Bank, touched off by an Israeli police raid on Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site, the compound home to the Al-Aqsa mosque.
Last week, the Israeli military struck sites linked to the Palestinian group Hamas in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip after militants in the two territories fired salvos of rockets at Israel. The mosque sits on a contested hilltop revered as the third-holiest site in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism.
Underscoring the situation in the West Bank, two British-Israeli sisters and their mother were killed when their car came under fire near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank last Friday. The mother, Lucy Dee, died of her wounds on Monday and was laid to rest in the settlement of Kfar Etzion south of Jerusalem on Tuesday.
In a separate incident, an Italian tourist was killed and five others were hurt last week when a Palestinian’s car careened onto a bike path near the beach in Tel Aviv in what authorities described as a suspected terrorist attack. The office of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he offered condolences to his Italian counterpart during a phone call on Tuesday.
In a step toward de-escalating the situation, Mr Netanyahu’s office said on Tuesday that authorities would ban Jewish visits to the sacred compound housing Al-Aqsa, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, for the remainder of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. That is standard for the final 10 days of the holiday, when Muslims often pray at the site overnight.
Jews are permitted to visit the compound, but not pray there, under longstanding agreements. But such visits, which have grown in numbers in recent years, have stoked anger, particularly because some Jews are often seen quietly praying.
The rare convergence of the Jewish Passover festival and Ramadan brought scores of religious Jews to the site last week and fuelled tensions that spiralled into unrest in Jerusalem — and a regional confrontation.
So far this year, 94 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank, according to a tally by the Associated Press, at least half of them affiliated with militant groups. During that time, 19 people were killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
With the country battling threats on multiple fronts, Mr Netanyahu on Monday reversed his decision to fire his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who expressed opposition to the government’s divisive plans to weaken the judiciary last month. - AP
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