TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian terrorist who had opened fire on them during an arrest raid in the Samaria city of Shechem early Thursday, the Israeli military said.
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The military said it was carrying out an operation to arrest a wanted suspect when armed men began firing on the troops. It said forces killed one of the terrorists. No soldiers were injured and the suspect was arrested, the military said.
The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, identified the man as Bakir Muhammad Musa Hashash, 21, saying he was critically wounded and later died following clashes with the military.
The incident comes amid a spike in Palestinian violence in recent weeks.
Last month, a Palestinian terrorist opened fire on a car filled with Jewish seminary students next to a West Bank settlement. Yehuda Dimentman, 25, was killed and two others were wounded near Homesh, which is considered illegal by the Israeli government.
Also last month, a Palestinian attacker stabbed and seriously wounded a chareidi Jew outside Jerusalem’s Old City. And just over a week before that, a Hamas terrorist opened fire in the Old City, killing an Israeli man. A female terrorist also stabbed a Jewish woman in the back in Jerusalem’s Nahalat Shimon neighborhood, lightly injuring her
At the same time, settler violence against Palestinians has risen, particularly in the northern West Bank.
Israel captured east Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria in the 1967 Six Day War, and the territories are now home to over 700,000 Israel settlers.
The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria as parts of a future independent state, along with the Gaza Strip, which Israel withdrew from in 2005.