(Deir al-Hatab) A Palestinian was killed on Wednesday during an Israeli army operation in the northern occupied West Bank, which has been plagued by high tensions in recent months, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Posted at 1:11 p.m.
According to this source, Alaa Zaghal, aged 21, died “of a gunshot wound to the head fired by the Israeli army” in Deir al-Hatab, near Nablus, according to the ministry, which specifies that two other people were injured in the shoulder.
According to Palestinian media and an AFP photographer on the spot, two journalists were injured.
For its part, the Israeli army said it had carried out an operation “to apprehend a terrorist suspected of being involved in the shooting attack on Sunday against an Israeli bus and a taxi near Nablus”.
The suspect presented as Salman Amran, 35 and a member of the Islamist group Hamas, “fired in the direction of the soldiers while he was barricading himself in a residential building”, says the army, which says it responded by shooting towards the building and to other points from which shots were coming.
He was arrested, says the army, which claims not to know “the cause” of the journalists’ injuries.
The Israeli army has stepped up operations in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, in the wake of a wave of anti-Israeli attacks that have left 20 dead since mid-March.
These operations, punctuated by clashes with the population and concentrated in the areas of Jenin and Nablus, in the north of the West Bank, also caused dozens of deaths on the Palestinian side, including members of armed groups, but also civilians whose Palestinian-American Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was covering an Israeli operation in Jenin.
The latest violence comes as Israel prepares for new legislative elections on 1er November, and against a background of internal tensions in the Palestinian Territories, where many young people accuse the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas of not opposing the operations of the Israeli forces.
On Tuesday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with senior Palestinian Authority official Hussein al-Sheikh at the White House.
Jake Sullivan “stressed the need to take action to defuse tensions in the West Bank by countering terrorism and provocation,” a White House statement said.
He also stressed “the importance for all parties to refrain from unilateral actions that threaten stability and the need to strengthen Palestinian institutions”.