Four Israeli settlers were killed and four others wounded in a gunfight by two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, near the Israeli settlement of Eli, in the second deadliest Palestinian attack of 2023.
According to the Israeli Army, at least two armed men, presumably linked to the Islamist group Hamas, arrived by car at the site -located between the cities of Ramallah and Nablus-, and once there they opened fire on a hummus restaurant and then on a Adjacent gas station.
At the site, doctors from the Israeli emergency service declared four people dead, while at the same time they found one seriously injured, two in moderate condition and another in good condition.
One of the attackers was shot dead by an armed civilian and the second escaped in a stolen vehicle, prompting Israeli forces to launch a wide-ranging operation to pursue him. Hours later, the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet reported that he was killed by Israeli agents after he tried to escape when he was going to be arrested.
Palestinian media identified the two armed men as young residents of the village of Urif, near Huwara, a Palestinian town that this year has seen an increase in attacks by Israeli settlers. The most serious was the irruption of a horde of people who, last February and after the death of two Israelis in a Palestinian attack, killed a local resident, caused multiple injuries and destroyed homes and vehicles.
Shortly after the nearby attack on the Eli settlement (considered illegal under international law), the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad commemorated the shooting, calling it a “natural response against the crimes of the Israeli occupation,” although no Palestinian militia claimed the authorship of the act
Even Hamas linked this armed aggression to a reprisal for the Israeli raid on Monday in Jenin, which left six Palestinians dead, almost a hundred wounded and was marked by the participation of an Israeli Air Force helicopter, an image that was not published. saw in the occupied West Bank for almost two decades. Israel claimed that its intervention was necessary to evacuate its eight soldiers injured by an explosive device detonated by local militias.
In this scenario, the voices in the most radical wing of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu are multiplying, demanding a large-scale military operation in the north of the West Bank. One of them, those of the Minister of Internal Security, the extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who demanded “selective assassinations and the destruction of buildings.”
In a post-attack video near Eli, the Israeli prime minister assured that “all options are on the table” and warned that “anyone who can harm us is in prison or in the grave.”
The outlook is not encouraging in what is also the most violent year in the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada, with at least 132 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in 2023, including 22 minors. For its part, in the same period, 25 people, three of them minors, have died on the Israeli side in Palestinian attacks.
