The Israeli army said it carried out an “anti-terrorist” operation on Saturday during which “suspects opened fire with live ammunition against soldiers from a moving vehicle”.
Two Palestinian fighters from the Islamic Jihad movement were killed on Saturday morning in a clash with Israeli soldiers conducting a raid in the occupied West Bank, according to concordant sources. The two young men were killed in Jaba, a small town south of Jenin in the northern West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry and Islamic Jihad said.
The armed wing of Islamic Jihad deplored in a press release the death of “its heroic martyrs“, killed while trying to intervene in front of the “occupying forces as they carried out a cowardly assassination operation“.
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The Israeli army indicated for its part that it had carried out an operationcounterterrorism“near Jaba during which”suspects opened fire with live ammunition on soldiers [israéliens] from a moving vehicle“. “The soldiers fired back with live ammunitionand touched two people, adds the text.
Twelve Palestinians killed since the beginning of the year
In Jaba, an AFP photographer saw a white Toyota with a windshield riddled with bullets at the driver’s level. The car was embedded in a cinder block wall from the front and completely gutted at the rear. According to the Palestinian ministry and Islamic Jihad, the two dead are Ezzedine Basem Hamamra and Amjad Adnane Khaliliya, both in their twenties.
A third Palestinian, 19-year-old Yazen Samer Jaabari, hit by Israeli fire a few days ago, died of his wounds, according to the same source. According to the official Palestinian agency Wafa, he was injured during an operation by the Israeli army on January 2 in the village of Kfar Dan, near Jenin, during which two Palestinians were killed.
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These new deaths bring to twelve the number of Palestinians killed since the beginning of the year in violence with Israeli forces or civilians in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Since a wave of anti-Israeli attacks in March and April 2022, the army stepped up operations in the areas of Jenin and Nablus, strongholds of armed Palestinian factions.
The year 2022 has been the deadliest in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005, according to the UN. According to an AFP count, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has killed at least 201 Palestinians (including 150 in the West Bank) and cost the lives of at least 26 Israelis in 2022.