PALESTINIAN MILITANTS HAVE killed three Israeli police officers in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has carried out large-scale attacks and raids in recent days.
The attack took place along a road in the southern West Bank early this morning when the militants opened fire on a vehicle.
The police confirmed that all three killed were officers and said the assailants fled.
A little-known militant group calling itself the Khalil al-Rahman Brigade claimed responsibility, while Hamas praised the attack as a “natural response” to the war in Gaza and called for more.
“Three members of the police force were killed this morning in a shooting attack,” Ouzi Levy, chief of the Israeli police in the West Bank, told reporters at the scene of the attack near the Tarqumiya checkpoint near the city of Hebron.
One of the attackers has been killed, the IDF said.
Israeli forces encircled a house where the alleged attacker was hiding in the city of Hebron, the military said in a statement, adding that he “was eliminated at the scene”.
Israel’s medical emergency service, Magen David Adom, earlier had announced the death of the three, two men and a woman.
“This was a very severe attack. We saw a vehicle with bullet marks on a mound beside the road,” the emergency service said in a statement quoting two of its paramedics who had rushed to the scene.
Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also visited the scene of the attack and called for more checkpoints be set up in the area.
“Right to life (of Israelis) is more important than freedom of movement of PA (Palestinian Authority) residents,” he told journalists.
“Instead of freeing terrorists, shoot them in the head.”
Meanwhile, international medical NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has described the scale and intensity of this week’s Israeli attacks in Jenin as “very alarming”.
“Israeli forces keep obstructing access to health facilities blocking and even targeting ambulances, delaying people’s access to care,” MSF said on X.
At the Khalil Suleiman Hospital there, which has been surrounded by Israeli Forces since the start of the incursion, MSF said electricity and water supplies have been compromised.
“The medical team has been forced to halt dialysis operations, key for the treatment of kidney failure.”
The Israeli attacks have mainly been focused on urban refugee camps in the northern part of the territory, where IDF troops have traded fire with militants on a near-daily basis since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
Israel has cut off internet access in some parts of the West Bank since the latest incursion, the largest in decades, began earlier this week.
The West Bank has seen a surge in Israeli military and settler violence since the Hamas-led 7 October attack. The Israeli government has also used the cover of the Gaza war to massively expand the development of illegal colonies (settlements) in the area.
2023 was already on course to be the most violent year on record in the West Bank and that was before the 7 October.
More than 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank over the same period.
Israel militarily occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians want all three territories for their future state, but the last serious peace talks collapsed more than 15 years ago.
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, recently described the situation in the West Bank as “a matter of grave concern”.
“Israel allows and facilitates an environment characterised by fear forcing communities from their homes and lands,” he said.
According to the UN, 3,070 people have been displaced by the demolition or confiscation of their homes since 7 October, more than double the number displaced in the ten preceding months.
In the same period, the UN has documented more than 1,000 settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israel has built well over 100 settlements across the West Bank, some of which resemble suburbs and small towns. More than 500,000 settlers with Israeli citizenship live in the settlements, all of which are illegal under international law, according to a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice.
The three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercising limited autonomy in population centres.
With reporting from AFP and Press Association.
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