Israeli fire kills Palestinian attacker, teen in West Bank

JERUSALEM (AP) — A Palestinian man who entered a settlement in the occupied West Bank armed with knives and explosive devices was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Friday, the military said.

Hours later, a 16-year-old Palestinian died after being critically wounded when Israeli troops opened fire on stone-throwing Palestinians in northern West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The violence comes a day after a Palestinian gunman shot and wounded Israelis in downtown Tel Aviv — the latest to grip Israel and the West Bank in one of the deadliest periods of unrest among Israelis and Palestinians in years.

The Israeli military said the armed Palestinian slipped into a farm near the settlement of Karnei Shomron, and was fatally shot by an Israeli settler overseeing the land.

Palestinian authorities identified him as 21-year-old Abed al-Sheikh. His father, Badaie al-Sheikh, said Israeli security forces searched his house, interrogated him and confiscated his son’s phone in the nearby Palestinian village of Saniriya.

The teen, Amir Ouda, was wounded close to a checkpoint near the town of Qalqilya, the Palestinian health ministry said. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

Hours earlier, Israeli security forces entered the Palestinian village of Naalin and prepared to demolish the family house of the Palestinian suspected of carrying out the Tel Aviv attack Thursday night. The shooter had opened fire near Dizengoff Street in a bustling area of the city’s center and wounded three Israelis, including one critically, before being shot and killed.

The Hamas militant group claimed the attacker, a 23-year-old former prisoner named Moataz Khawaja, as a member of the organization’s armed wing. Hamas said the shooting was in response to an Israeli military arrest raid that day that killed three gunmen in the northern village of Jaba, along with another raid earlier this week that killed seven Palestinians in the flashpoint Jenin refugee camp, including a wanted assailant and a 14-year-old boy.

“This is evidence of the equation that says, for every action there is a reaction,” Mosher al-Masri, a Hamas official, told The Associated Press from a rally in support of the Tel Aviv shooting held in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya. “Blood will be returned with blood, the killers will be killed, the bombers will be bombed.”

Israeli police said Friday they were continuing their investigation into the Tel Aviv attack, and that two men from the Israeli town of Ramle, near Tel Aviv, and the Bedouin town of Kuseife, in the Negev desert, had turned themselves in over their alleged smuggling of the gunman and other Palestinians from the occupied West Bank into Israel.

As Israeli forces stormed into Naalin and arrested two family members of the suspected attacker for questioning, they said they were met by a barrage of explosive devices, Molotov cocktails and stones. Israeli troops responded with gunfire, which they said struck at least one Palestinian. The person’s condition was unclear.

Before being arrested, Khawaja’s father, Salah Khawaja, said he felt pride in his son for carrying out the attack. Like many Palestinians living in an environment where attacks on Israelis are celebrated and their perpetrators exalted, he expressed little sympathy for Israeli civilians and said he understood his son’s desire for revenge.

“Praise God, Moataz is beloved by everyone,” he told reporters. “Any young man who witnesses such massacres will naturally respond.”

Further north, Israeli forces entered the Palestinian city of Tulkarm, home to an emerging armed group that has increasingly attracted young Palestinians angry at Israeli violence and disillusioned by their leadership.

Gunmen opened fire, striking an Israeli military vehicle in the city, the army said. Others hurled explosive devices and shot at Israeli forces from a passing car. The Israeli army said it responded with live fire. There were no immediate reports of casualties on either side.

The past few months have been marked by rising violence in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which Israel captured along with the Gaza strip in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians seek those territories for a future independent state.

At least 75 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire during military arrest raids and other confrontations so far this year, according to a tally by the AP. Over that same period, a series of attacks by Palestinians against Israelis has left at least 14 Israelis dead so far this year, all but one of them civilians.

The upsurge in deaths has raised fears of a possible greater escalation under Israel’s most right-wing government in history, which has pledged tough action against the Palestinians.

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Associated Press writer Wafaa Shurafa in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.

Isabel Debre, The Associated Press