In West Bank Palestinian woman, 72, killed after suspected car attack
Eleven Israelis have been killed in stabbings, shootings or other
attacks. Israeli forces have shot dead at least 70 Palestinians,
including 42 who Israel says were carrying out or about to carry out
attacks. Many were teenagers.
Israeli soldiers shot and killed an elderly Palestinian
motorist who the military said tried to run them over in the occupied
West Bank on Friday and a knife-wielding assailant wounded an Israeli
civilian.
The incidents extended a five-week-old campaign of Palestinian attacks fuelled in part by Muslim anger at stepped-up Jewish visits to a contested Jerusalem shrine, as well as by long-deadlocked peacemaking with Israel.
Eleven
Israelis have been killed in stabbings, shootings or other attacks.
Israeli forces have shot dead at least 70 Palestinians, including 42 who
Israel says were carrying out or about to carry out attacks. Many were
teenagers.
Near the West Bank city of Hebron, a
Palestinian woman, aged 72, tried to ram her car into a group of Israeli
soldiers, a military spokeswoman said. The soldiers opened fire and
wounded the woman, who was taken to an Israeli hospital. The hospital
confirmed her age and said she had died before being admitted.
Medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent who initially attended at the scene said the woman was shot 15 times.
Soon
after, near the Jewish settlement of Beit El, an Israeli civilian was
stabbed by an assailant believed to be Palestinian. The attacker fled
the scene and was being searched for, the Israeli military said.
The
violence has been the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, with Israeli
forces hard-put to anticipate often spontaneous attacks by young
Palestinians unaffiliated to militant groups.
Videos of some attacks and their aftermath have been shared on social media, fuelling the anger of young Palestinians.
Though
peace talks have been stalled since mid-2014, the U.S.-backed
Palestinian adminstration in the West Bank has been quietly cooperating
on security with Israel, while publicly criticising the Israeli
crackdowns as heavy-handed.
"My people,
country are victims of an unjust (Israeli) aggression which includes
people and places and does not spare old people or children," Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told the UNESCO General Assembly in Paris.
Israel
has accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of stoking the flames
with false allegations it is eroding a decades-old ban on non-Muslim
prayer at Jerusalem's al Aqsa mosque compound, which has seen increased
visits by Jews who revere the site as the vestige of their two biblical
temples.
"We are taking action against (Palestinian) incitement,"
Israeli Interior Minister Silvan Shalom said on Friday, alluding to
steps such as the shuttering this week of a Palestinian radio station in
Hebron and the arrests of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs over social
media posts deemed to be promoting violence.
"I
hope that all of these things together will have a calming effect. I
cannot say that there are signs of total calm, but I hope that it will
be possible to control the situation," Shalom told Israel's Army Radio.
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