Global Courant
NABLUS, West Bank — Israeli forces killed two wanted Palestinians in a flashpoint town in the occupied West Bank on Friday, days after Israel concluded a major two-day offensive designed to crack down on militants.
The ongoing violence has raised questions about the effectiveness of the attack earlier this week, which saw Israel conduct infrequent airstrikes against militant targets, deploy hundreds of troops and cause widespread damage to roads, homes and businesses. As a result of the raid, 12 Palestinians and an Israeli soldier were killed.
The raid bore the hallmarks of the second Palestinian uprising, a period of violence in the early 2000s that left thousands of people dead.
Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency said on Friday that the two men, said to be behind a shooting at a police vehicle this week, were killed in a shootout with Israeli troops in the heart of the West Bank’s commercial district of Nablus. capital.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said two men were killed by Israeli fire and identified them as Khayri Mohammed Sari Shaheen, 34, and Hamza Moayed Mohammed Maqbool, 32.
In the aftermath of the gunfight, shell casings littered the bloodstained ground. Palestinians carried the bodies of the slain men to the hospital, chanting “God is great!” as cannons fired into the sky.
Friday’s deaths are part of a years-long spiral of violence that shows no signs of abating despite this week’s ferocious Israeli operation at the Jenin refugee camp. They follow a shooting by a Hamas militant near an Israeli settlement in the West Bank on Thursday that left an Israeli soldier dead.
Israel has been conducting raids in the West Bank for 16 months in response to a spate of Palestinian attacks on Israelis last spring. The northern West Bank, which includes Nablus and Jenin and where the Palestinian Authority has less of a foothold, has been a major point of friction during that period.
More than 150 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year and Palestinian attacks against Israelis have killed at least 27 people, including a shooting last month that killed four settlers.
Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians seek those areas for their hoped-for independent state.
