Israeli forces kill 3 Palestinians on West Bank
Jerusalem, Mar 1 (EFE).- Israeli forces killed three Palestinians in two separate incidents on the West Bank on Tuesday, according to authorities on both sides.
Sometime after midnight Monday, Israeli Border Police came under gunfire from multiple directions when they entered a refugee camp in the northern West Bank city of Jenin to detain a “terror suspect,” the force said.
The officers returned fire, killing two “terrorists,” the Border Police said.
Israeli media said the two people killed were members of Islamic Jihad.
WAFA, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, identified the fatalities as Abdullah al-Husari, 22, and Shadi Najim, 18.
“Israeli forces frequently raid Palestinian houses almost on a daily basis across the West Bank on the pretext of searching for ‘wanted’ Palestinians, triggering clashes with residents,” WAFA said.
The second incident took place in the southern West Bank at Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, where university student Ammar Shafiq Abu Afifeh was fatally shot by Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
An Israeli security official said that troops spotted Abu Afifeh and another Palestinian man at a spot between Beit Fajjar and the Jewish settlement of Migdal Oz.
The two men ran when the soldiers approached and after a warning shot into the air, the troops fired on the Palestinians.
“IDF forces initiated a suspect arrest procedure, which included shooting at the suspects. The death of one of them was later determined,” according to a statement from the military.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called the killing represented “a continuation of Israel’s criminal policy against the Palestinians.”
In a related development on Tuesday, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem can remain in their homes pending a final determination of who owns the properties.
Five years after Israel seized mainly Arab East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, settler activists filed a suit claiming that the properties in Sheikh Jarrah rightly belong to Jews.
In the spring of 2021, evictions of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah led to disturbances in East Jerusalem that in turn sparked the eruption of violence between Israel and Palestinian armed factions that left nearly 250 people dead in Gaza and a dozen more in Israel. EFE
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