Three Israelis were wounded on Thursday in a knife attack in a settlement near Ramallah in the West Bank occupied by an assailant who was killed, the Israeli army said.
“A terrorist infiltrated (in the colony) Adam and wounded three civilians, before being shot,” she said in a statement. “The wounded were evacuated to the hospital”.
According to the emergency services, two seriously injured Israelis were evacuated to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The third, slightly wounded in the leg, was evacuated to another hospital.
In a statement, Hadassah Hospital reported that the two wounded had been admitted to the intensive care unit, one 31-year-old being in critical condition, while the other 58-year-old was not in danger. .
The Israeli army refers to Palestinian terrorists as “terrorists” who commit attacks on Israelis.
After the attack, Israeli soldiers arrived at the scene and conducted research in the area. The West Bank is a Palestinian territory occupied militarily by Israel.
The latest Palestinian knife attack in a West Bank settlement dates back to April 2018 when a Palestinian attempted to stab an Israeli with a screwdriver near a gas station near the Maale Adumim settlement east of Jerusalem. The assailant, severely shot, had succumbed the next day.
Many knife attacks against Israelis in recent years have been carried out by Palestinians whom the Israeli authorities describe as “lone wolves”.
Thursday’s attack came amid recurrent violence between the Israeli army and Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip.
On Thursday, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas promised to avenge the deaths of three of its members, killed the day before in Israeli raids carried out in retaliation for firing rockets from the Gaza Strip that injured an Israeli soldier.
“The enemy will pay a high price for the crime he commits daily against the rights of our people and our fighters,” warned the Ezzedine al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
Last Saturday, Hamas announced a ceasefire in the aftermath of an escalation of violence that claimed the lives of four Palestinians and an Israeli soldier – the first Israeli soldier killed in the area since the Gaza war in 2014.
Since the announcement of the ceasefire, the region has experienced a lull with, in particular, a decrease in the number of kites or incendiary balloons thrown from the Gaza Strip to southern Israel.
In recent weeks, the Israeli authorities have reported about 20 fires a day and nearly 3,000 hectares burned since March 30 by homemade incendiary devices launched from the Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, Israel partially reopened the Kerem Shalom terminal, through which goods destined for the Gaza Strip, which it closed on July 9 in response to fires provoked in southern Israel by kites and balloons, pass through. launched from Gaza.