Palestinian gunmen have killed four Israelis and injured four more in an attack near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, in the latest burst of violence in the territory.
The attack on Tuesday was the deadliest against Israelis since a shooting in a settlement in East Jerusalem in January and comes the day after Israeli forces killed six Palestinians, including a 15-year-old, and injured more than 90 during a raid in the city of Jenin that erupted into a multi-hour gun battle.
Israeli medics said that one of the four people injured in the shooting near Eli, a settlement north of the Palestinian city of Ramallah, was in a serious condition and that all were being taken to hospitals in Israel.
Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls the blockaded Gaza Strip, said the shooting was a response to Israel’s “crimes carried out [on Monday] at the Jenin refugee camp” but stopped short of claiming responsibility.
Israel’s military said one man involved in the attack had been “neutralised” by a civilian and that a second was “neutralised” by security forces after fleeing in a stolen car. It said both were “affiliated” with Hamas.
The latest bloodshed follows 18 months of mounting violence in the West Bank which has fuelled fears that the long-simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be heading towards a broader escalation.
This year is already on course to be the bloodiest for more than a decade in the West Bank, where Israeli forces have been conducting near-nightly raids since a spate of attacks by Palestinians on Israelis last spring.
According to UN data, which does not include the most recent violence, Israeli forces have killed 114 Palestinians in the West Bank so far this year, while Palestinians have killed 16 Israelis. Palestinians seek the West Bank as the heart of a future state, but Israel has occupied it since 1967.
The bloodshed has sparked demands from hardliners in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — which took office last year with ultranationalists in key security posts pledging a tougher stance against the Palestinians — for the military to take a more aggressive approach in the West Bank.
During Monday’s raid in Jenin — in which Israel deployed helicopter gunships in the West Bank for the first time since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, ended in 2005 — Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister, demanded the government launch a “broad operation” in the territory.
After the shooting on Tuesday, Netanyahu said that “all options are open”. In a statement, he said: “We will continue to fight terrorism with full force and we will defeat it.”
The Palestinian foreign ministry branded the Israeli raid on Jenin “a dangerous escalation that will drag the region into more bloodshed” and appealed to the international community to intervene “immediately and urgently”.
There have been no serious peace talks between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships since 2014 and CIA chief Bill Burns warned earlier this year that the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories “has a very unhappy resemblance to some of [the] realities” during the second intifada.
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