JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinian militants killed three Israeli police officers Sunday when they opened fire on a vehicle in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has carried out widespread raids in recent days.
The attack took place along a road in the southern West Bank. The raids mainly targeted urban refugee camps in the northern part of the territory, where Israeli forces have exchanged fire with militants almost daily since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
Police confirmed that all three dead were officers and said the attackers had slipped away.
One of the officers killed was Roni Shakuri, 61, from the southern town of Sderot, near the Gaza border, police said. His daughter Mor, who was also a police officer, was killed in a battle with Hamas militants as they tried to take over the Sderot police station during the October 7 attack.
A little-known militant group calling itself the Khalil al-Rahman Brigade claimed responsibility for the shooting on Sunday. Hamas praised the attack as a “natural response” to the war in Gaza and called for more.
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Later on Sunday, Israeli forces surrounded a house in the nearby city of Hebron, where the army said the suspected attacker was believed to be hiding. At least six soldiers entered the structure, opened fire repeatedly and threw a grenade inside. Soldiers later removed a man’s body from inside a stretcher, at one point turning to Palestinian journalists and firing several bullets at them.
The military later said the dead man was the shooter of the morning attack and that an M-16 automatic rifle was found on him. It said the man had previously served in the Palestinian Authority security forces.
The West Bank has seen a wave of violence since Hamas’ attack from Gaza on October 7 sparked the war there.
More than 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, mainly during Israeli military arrests. Most appear to have been militants involved in gun battles with Israeli forces, but civilian bystanders and stone-throwing protesters have also been killed.
The past ten months have also seen an increase in settler violence against Palestinians and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians want all three areas for their future state, but the last serious peace talks failed more than fifteen years ago.
Israel has built more than a hundred settlements in the West Bank, some of which resemble suburbs and small towns. More than 500,000 settlers with Israeli citizenship live in the settlements, which most of the international community considers illegal.
The three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly indefinite Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercising limited autonomy in population centers.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
