Israelis kill 3 Palestinians
JERUSALEM, March 12, (Agencies): Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinian militants Sunday who opened fire on troops in the occupied West Bank, the military said, the latest bloodshed in a year-long wave of violence in the region.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, claimed the men killed as members.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said the men were killed by Israeli fire near the city of Nablus and identified them as Jihad Mohammed al-Shami, 24, Uday Othman alShami, 22 and Mohammed Raed Dabeek, 18.
The military said it confiscated three M16 rifles from the militants after the shootout and that one gunman turned himself in and was arrested.
The deaths Sunday bring to 80 the number of Palestinians killed since the start of the year, as Israel has stepped up arrest raids in the West Bank. A spasm of Palestinian attacks against Israelis has killed 14 people in 2023.
The fresh violence follows an Israeli military raid last week on the West Bank village of Jaba, where three Palestinian militants were killed. Hours later, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on a busy Tel Aviv thoroughfare at the start of the Israeli weekend, wounding three people before being shot and killed.
The current round of violence is one of the worst between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank in years. It began last spring after a series of Palestinian attacks against Israelis that triggered near-nightly Israeli raids in the West Bank.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 2022, making it the deadliest year in those areas since 2004, according to the leading Israeli rights group B’Tselem. Palestinian attacks against Israelis during that same time killed 30 people.
The military says most of the Palestinians killed were militants. But stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in confrontations have also been killed.
Israel says the raids are essential to dismantle militant networks and prevent future attacks. But attacks appear to be intensifying rather than slowing down.
The Palestinians view the raids as a tightening by Israel of its 55-year, open-ended occupation of lands they seek for their future state.
Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their future independent state.
Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes early on Sunday attacked military positions in Syria wounding three soldiers, the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported.
SANA, monitored in the Jordanian capital, said the jet fighters carried out the raid at 7:15 a.m. (Syria local time), firing salvos of air-to-surface missiles, targeting military positions in country sides of the coastal Syrian city Tartous and Hama city.
The missiles were fired by the Israeli fighter jet as they were flying over northern Lebanon, it said.
Syrian air defenses confronted the incoming rockets knocking out a number of them, SANA added.
The attack followed a strike, five days ago, on airport of the northern city Aleppo, where authorities declared that the attack paralyzed operations via the air facility, key for securing incoming aid for the needy.
Tel Aviv has carried out such air strikes repeatedly since outbreak of the Syrian crisis in 2011.
In other news, tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated Saturday against a contentious plan to overhaul the judiciary as the government pressed ahead with the plan.
The nationwide demonstrations have been a regular weekly event for more than two months.
Despite the demonstrations, Netanyahu and his allies have pledged to press ahead with a series of bills that would strip the Supreme Court of its ability to review legislation and give coalition politicians control over judicial appointments.