Four Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in West Bank

JENIN, Palestinian Territories: Four Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces on Thursday, medics and security officials said, as violence flared across Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

Two Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces in Jenin — 14-year-old Mohammed Samer Khalouf and 28-year-old Farouq Salameh — while four others suffered gunshot wounds, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

Israel’s army described Salameh as “an operative belonging to the Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation,” and said he was the target of the afternoon raid.An army statement blamed Salameh for several recent shooting attacks targeting Israeli forces and said soldiers raided a Jenin building following intelligence that he was inside.

There was a gun fight, and Salameh fled before being tracked down by soldiers, the army said, adding that he “pulled out a gun” before being “neutralised”.Hours earlier, a Palestinian who allegedly stabbed an Israeli officer was shot dead in Jerusalem’s Old City.

He “stabbed one of the officers in the upper body” before he was shot dead by two other officers, a police statement said.The latest killings came two days after an Israeli general election and amid what the UN says is the deadliest period in years in the West Bank, with near daily army raids and an increase in clashes and attacks on Israeli forces. The incident in Israeli-annexed east al-Quds happened beside a checkpoint for Muslim worshippers visiting the nearby Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest site, which is known by Jews as the Temple Mount.

Shaare Zedek hospital in al-Quds said they were treating a man suffering a stab wound to the torso in moderate condition, and another man who was lightly wounded by a gunshot to the leg, likely from shots fired by police.

Another police officer was lightly wounded after being hit by fragments during the incident, al-Quds’s Hadassah hospital said.Israeli forces sealed off surrounding streets, while a forensics team photographed the scene beside a stall loaded with bread.

Mourners, meanwhile, gathered in the West Bank village of Beit Duqqu for the funeral of a 42-year-old man killed in clashes with Israeli forces.Israeli Border Police said officers shot dead a suspect “with a firebomb in his hand” in Beit Duqqu, northwest of Jerusalem.At least 34 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed across east Jerusalem and the West Bank since the start of October, according to a tally. The surge in violence prompted a weeks-long lockdown of the West Bank city of Nablus, which the Israeli military said was lifted on Thursday.

The closure imposed on October 11 had restricted travel in and out of the city for around 200,000 Palestinians, disrupting daily life, the local economy and access to medical care and education.