Israeli authorities seek assailant in deadly attack

JERUSALEM >> Two Israelis were killed and one other seriously wounded after a Palestinian assailant opened fire at two locations in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli authorities said, the latest in a spate of shootings.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli army spokesman, said a manhunt was underway for the assailant, who fled the area after first assaulting an Israeli soldier with a knife, stealing his weapon and then opening fire on passing vehicles and at an intersection.

“We will spare no effort to find this perpetrator and bring him to justice,” Conricus said in a news briefing. The army confirmed later that the dead Israeli was a soldier, Staff Sgt. Gal Keidan.

The family of Rabbi Achiad Ettinger, a father of 12 from the nearby settlement of Eli, announced that he had died of wounds suffered in the attack. It was not immediately clear whether the assailant was acting alone or as part of a terrorism cell.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the army was “in pursuit of the terrorists,” indicating that there may have been more than one gunman involved.

“I am certain that we will apprehend them, and we will deal with them to the fullest extent of the law, as we have done in all of the recent incidents,” Netanyahu said.

The shooting comes just three weeks before a general election, on April 9 and puts the long-serving Israeli leader in the difficult position of not appearing too soft in dealing with such attacks, but also avoiding further inflaming tensions.

Netanyahu draws a large portion of his base from the roughly 450,000 Israeli Jews who live in the West Bank, territory that Israel captured in the 1967 IsraeliArab war and Palestinians hope to include in a future sovereign state. Many in the international community consider these settlements illegal.