Palestinian shot dead trying to stab Israeli
Israeli soldiers shot dead a Palestinian who tried to stab one of them in the occupied West Bank yesterday, the military said.
The incident occurred at a bus stop near the large Jewish settlement of Ariel.
“A Palestinian attempted to stab a soldier at the site. Our troops fired at him and he was killed. There were no casualties among our forces,” the military said. There was no immediate Palestinian comment.
Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service said the assailant, whom it did not name, was a resident of the West Bank village of Biddya and had no record of anti-Israel activity.
Biddya was the home village of a Palestinian woman who died of a head injury on Friday caused by rocks thrown at her car by Israeli settlers. The Shin Bet statement, in its reference to Biddya, made no mention of Friday’s incident, which Israeli police are investigating.
Palestinians began a wave of knife and car-ramming attacks in the West Bank and in Israel in 2015, after peace talks with Israel collapsed. Such incidents have become more sporadic.
Palestinians want the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, to be part of an independent state and most countries consider Jewish settlements built in the area to be illegal. Israel disputes this.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank village of Khan Al Amar, four activists were arrested for obstructing military preparations to demolish buildings. Two of the arrested were Israeli nationals and two were Palestinians. Activists reported that police pushed back dozens of people who had gathered to block the demolition of the Bedouin village.
The four were blocking a bulldozer moving in to clear sewage that had pooled near the village from a nearby Israeli settlement. This month, Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank said that a sewage pipe had burst in the area and the military was dispatching a lorry to pump the waste out.