WEST BANK (Reuters) – Israeli forces on Thursday killed three wanted Palestinian militants in connection with a shooting attack that killed a British-Israeli woman and her two daughters, the Israeli military said.
In a rare break-in the day residents started their day, the military broke into the center of the hotspot city of Nablus and stormed the apartment where the man was staying, according to the military. It unfolded and three people died.
The military says the men behind a car attack near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank last month killed two of them, Anglo-Israeli mother Lucy Dee and her daughters Maya and Lina. said there was The woman’s widow, Leo Dee, told the Associated Press that she was “consoled” by the news of her death. In a statement after the attack, the Hamas militant group, whose members were three men identified as Hassan Qatnani, Moaz al-Masri and Ibrahim Jabr, said the group had claimed responsibility for the April attack.
A 26-year-old Palestinian woman died in an Israeli fire on Thursday after another incident occurred near the West Bank city of Hawala, where a 20-year-old Israeli was slightly injured in a knife attack.
In Nablus, an Israeli artillery shell pierced the roof of a gunman’s shelter in the heart of Nablus’ old city, leaving nothing in its wake, but twisted metal, cement blocks, and torn pieces. The mattress was still stained with blood. A few hours after the troops left, a young man collected dozens of ejected shells in a narrow street.
Nablus, the West Bank’s commercial center and second-largest city, has been subjected to repeated Israeli raids over the past year, but the risk of friction with local residents has increased during the day. Few raids were made. Residents have been involved in previous battles.
Manal Abu Safiye, 57, said he woke up at 7 a.m. to the sound of Israeli military vehicles driving around the city. It was nothing new to her after a year of intense violence in the Old Town, but the gunshots sounded closer than she had ever heard before. An explosion suddenly blew up her neighbor’s house, killing three people, she said. She didn’t know much about her neighbors, she said, except that Ibrahim Jabr had cancer.
One man, who only identified himself as Kareem for fear of retaliation, was walking along a limestone path when an elderly man and a woman in a long robe were attacked by a Muslim woman she had never seen before. As soon as they saw him, they said they knew who they were. It was an Israeli special forces unit. He ran to his house and hid there until the gunfire stopped. “So many men from the city have been killed,” he said. “We are used to these raids. That’s the story of life in Nablus.”
After the army left, dozens of masked men fired into the air and paraded through the streets waving Palestinian flags as onlookers honked their horns and cheered. At a man’s funeral, many mourners sang “God is Great.”
The violence in Nablus occurred at a particularly sensitive time in the region. It comes just days after a prominent Palestinian prisoner died in Israeli custody after going on a lengthy hunger strike over being held in custody. His death sparked a volley of rockets from militants in Gaza and Israeli air strikes on a coastal enclave, killing one man. The fatal attack on an Israeli car last month shocked Israelis as it instantly reduced the Dee family from seven members to four. Leo, the father, has repeatedly appeared in the Israeli media, saying he harbors no hatred for those who killed his family and calls for national unity amid deep social rifts.
“Thank God that this was done in a way that saved the lives of soldiers and, as far as we know, caused minimal if not zero civilian casualties. It is very important to us that no Palestinian people were harmed in this operation,” Leo Dee told the Associated Press from his home in the Jewish settlement in the West Bank of Ephrat.
Israeli officials said the raids showed the attackers would eventually be hunted down. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement: “Our message to those who seek to harm us is to get along with you, whether it takes a day, a week or a month.
