New cycle of violence in the West Bank: twelve dead in two days

June 20, 2023

An anti-Israeli attack carried out by two snipers left four dead on Tuesday afternoon in the northern West Bank the day after an Israeli military raid that left six dead on the Palestinian side.

The attack took place near a petrol station near the Israeli settlement of Eli, between Ramallah and Nablus. The two assailants were killed after shooting two Eli residents and a young man from central Israel. At around 11:30 p.m. (8:30 p.m. GMT), the identity of the fourth death was not known.

In Huwara, near Nablus, a hundred Jewish settlers attacked the inhabitants and set fire to agricultural land, according to the mayor of this Palestinian city and a resident reached by AFP by telephone, thus seeming to repeat the scenario of a punitive expedition carried out in February after a Palestinian attack that claimed the lives of two Israelis in the area.

Arrived on the spot, an AFP journalist saw olive groves on fire. Several dozen people were injured, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Other settler attacks were reported in the evening in Al-Lubban al-Sharqiya, near Eli, and in Beit Furik, another town in the northern West Bank.

According to the Israeli army, one of the two perpetrators of the attack near Eli was “neutralized” by an armed civilian at the scene of the attack, where an AFP photographer saw his body.

According to the Israeli security forces, the second assailant, on the run, was also “neutralized” near Toubas, where the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported the death of a Palestinian man killed by “bullets from the occupation” (Israel, editor’s note).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack “shocking and repugnant”. “We will continue to fight terrorism with all our might and we will defeat it,” he added.

“Nothing can justify such terrorist attacks. Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones,” German diplomacy said in a statement “strongly condemning the attack.”

According to Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, the two shooters injured four people, one of whom was in serious condition.

This new tragedy comes the day after violent clashes during an Israeli army raid that claimed the lives of six Palestinians, including an Islamic Jihad fighter, in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.

On the spot, the Israeli army encountered strong resistance. The operation lasted more than ten hours, during which an Israeli attack helicopter fired missiles, which had not happened in years in Jenin, according to the army, in order to allow its troops to extricate themselves .

During the raid, some 90 Palestinians and eight members of the Israeli security forces were injured.

The attack near Eli is “the response to the crimes of the occupation in the Jenin refugee camp yesterday,” said Hazem Qassem, spokesman for the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

Tareq Selmi, spokesman for Islamic Jihad saw it as “the heroic operation of a commando within a context of the legitimate right to self-defense”.

Eli officials identified two of the dead from the attack as Elisha Antman and Ofer Fayerman, residents of the settlement. The third dead was identified as Harel Masood, 21, from central Israel, according to a local official.

“This is our land, this is where we live and we are going to be strong,” Eliana Passentin, who lives in Eli, told AFP. “We should be able to live our life every day without fear.”

Israeli incursions into the northern West Bank, a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups, often degenerate into deadly clashes.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 166 Palestinians, 21 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian have been killed in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an AFP tally compiled from official Israeli and Palestinian sources before Eli’s attack.

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.

Apart from occupied and annexed East Jerusalem, nearly three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. About 490,000 Israelis also live there in settlements considered by the UN to be illegal under international law.