Two Israelis were killed on Saturday August 19 in an attack in a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank, which sparked a manhunt by Israeli forces. The attack “was perpetrated against a number of Israeli civilians in the area of Huwara town”the army said in a statement.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu later clarified that the two dead were a “father and a son”. security forces “are actively working to track down the murderer and bring him to justice, as we have done with all such murderers so far”he said.
The Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, said he was warned shortly after 3 p.m. of an attack at a car wash station in Huwara. The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that the army had closed the main entrances to Nablus, a large Palestinian city in the northern West Bank, and that the soldiers were forcing businesses to close while they searched for the suspected perpetrators of the attack. attack.
A spokesman for Hamas, the Islamist movement in power in the Gaza Strip also active in the West Bank, welcomed this operation which, according to him, is “the result of the resistance’s constant promise to defend our people and respond to the crimes of the occupation”. Hamas, however, did not claim responsibility for the attack.
Series of attacks
Since the beginning of 2023, the West Bank, territory occupied by Israel since 1967, has been the scene of a series of attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis, as well as violence committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. , particularly in the city of Huwara, located south of Nablus.
On Saturday, a Palestinian man died from wounds sustained by Israeli forces shooting him in the head during an operation in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank on Wednesday. On Thursday, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian militant in a raid in Jenin, also in the northern West Bank.
At the end of February, after the death of two Israeli settlers in the area of Huwara, dozens of other settlers swept through the town and set fire to numerous buildings and vehicles, provoking a wave of indignation, locally and internationally.
Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967. About 490,000 Jewish settlers also live there, in settlements considered by the UN to be illegal under international law.
At least 218 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the year in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as 30 Israelis, 1 Ukrainian and 1 Italian, according to a count by Agence France-Presse compiled from sources official. These statistics include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, including minors, and, on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, including minors and three members of the Arab minority.