Four Palestinians, including an attacker, killed by Israeli forces


Four Palestinians, including an attacker and a fighter, were killed Thursday by Israeli forces in the West Bank and Jerusalem, amid an upsurge in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the afternoon, the Israeli army said it was conducting a raid in Jenin, a stronghold of armed factions in the northern West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.

“There are two martyrs shot dead by the occupation forces and four people injured (…),” the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. According to local sources, one of the two men killed is Farouq Jamil Salameh, 28, a commander of the al-Quds brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, the second Palestinian Islamist movement after Hamas.

Violence that occurs after the legislative elections

Earlier in the day, in the Old City of Jerusalem, located in the eastern part occupied since 1967 by Israel, a 20-year-old Palestinian, Amer Bader, was shot dead by security forces after injuring three policemen in a offensive. The man “pulled out a knife and stabbed an officer,” police said. “As a result of this knife attack, three police officers were injured” in total.

Shaare Zedek Hospital said it treated two injured people in stable condition. “One suffered from stab wounds to the chest and the other had gunshot wounds to the leg.” Before dawn, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian in clashes in Beit Duqqu, a village just north of Jerusalem in the West Bank.

According to witnesses and the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Daoud Mahmoud Khalil Rayan, 42, was killed by “live ammunition to the heart” during a march in honor of a Palestinian man killed the day before after carrying out an anti-terrorism attack. Israeli. This violence comes in the wake of legislative elections Tuesday in Israel which should allow Benjamin Netanyahu to return to power thanks to his allies, the religious parties and the far right.

Siege of Nablus lifted

In the wake of deadly attacks in Israel last March and April and other anti-Israeli attacks that followed, the Israeli army carried out more than 2,000 raids in the West Bank, particularly in the areas of Jenin and Nablus. These raids, and the clashes that are sometimes associated with them, left more than 120 dead on the Palestinian side, the heaviest toll in seven years and the second highest since the end of the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s. according to the UN.

Around Nablus, the Israeli army has lifted its siege imposed for three weeks after a deadly attack on a soldier claimed by a group of local fighters, Areen al-Oussoud or “The den of lions”. After this attack, the army blocked or filtered access to Nablus and intensified its raids in this major city in the northern West Bank, targeting this group and causing several deaths.

After an assessment of the situation, “it has been decided that the general closure imposed on the entrances and exits of Nablus will be lifted”, the army said in a statement. According to an AFP journalist on the spot, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh and the representative of the European Union for the Palestinian Territories, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, went there on Thursday.



Source link -75