Israel detains 24 Hamas suspects in West Bank raids
Israel detains 24 Hamas suspects in West Bank raids
A Palestinian attempted to stab an Israeli border policeman near the West Bank village of Abu Dis Tuesday and was killed by security forces, the police said, in the day’s third attack.
Other border policemen opened fire at the attacker, who was declared dead at the scene, a statement said. The incident occurred in an area adjacent to Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Earlier in the day, violence returned to Jerusalem after a recent lull with two separate attacks, the police said.
One saw a knife-wielding Palestinian run toward two security guards near Dama-scus Gate, the main entr-ance to Jerusalem’s Old City, and the guards shot him. The man, named as Mohammed Nimr, 37, from the east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Issawiya, died of his wounds in a Jerusalem hospital. And in the east Jerusalem Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev, two knife-wielding Palestinian boys, aged 12 and 114, attacked a security guard. The younger of the boys, from east Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp, was shot and seriously wounded. The other, also from east Jerusalem, was arrested.
While knife and car-ramming assaults have continued in the occupied West Bank during a weeks-long surge of violence, Tuesday’s attacks were the first in Jerusalem in more than a week. The unrest has killed 10 Israelis and at least 77 people on the Palestinian side — one of them an Israeli Arab — since October 1. Many of the Palestinians killed were alleged attackers.
Meanwhile, Israel security forces arrested 24 suspected members of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in overnight raids in the northern West Bank, the Army said on Tuesday. The raids targeted a suspected Hamas network in Qalqilya, a town just over the Green Line from Israel that is partly surrounded by Israel’s controversial separation barrier.
“The heads of the network, who ran the regional headquarters, were operating to renew Hamas activity in the area and plotting terror activity,” the Army said. Those detained included “senior Hamas operatives who have been previously arrested for participating and planning Hamas terror activity,” it said.
