WEST BANK (Dispatches) –
Zionist troops killed another Palestinian on Sunday following a car-ramming operation that left five settlers injured near the city of Ariha in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian Information Center, quoting Israeli media, said following the attack the regime’s forces fatally shot the Palestinian man who was driving the car south of Ariha.
The Palestinian news agency also cited Israeli media as identifying the driver as 49-year-old Barkat Odeh from the town of al-Eizariya near East Al-Quds.
A day earlier, a Palestinian man who shot dead a Zionist settler at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank city of Al-Khalil has been killed by a trooper, according to medics and local media reports.
The shooting at the checkpoint near the Kiryat Arba settlement, where a group of predominantly right-wing Zionist settlers live, comes days before the occupying regime holds its fifth election in less than four years and as violence surges in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz identified the Zionist settler as 49-year-old Ronen Hanania while Palestinian media reported that Mohammad al-Jaabari, a 35-year-old Al-Khalil resident, was martyred in the fatal shooting.
The Hamas resistance movement announced the martyred Al-Khalil fighter as its member.
Hamas said that shots fired by Palestinian resistance fighters in the retaliatory operation near an illegal settlement in the southern part of the occupied West Bank are a practical response to the crimes that the Zionist regime is perpetrating against the Palestinians.
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said in a statement that the Saturday night operation close to the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba “proves that the resistance front can surprise the occupiers and deal them stinging blows.”
“Resistance bullets are a practical response to the Zionists’ settlement expansion policies, the crimes that they are committing, and their repeated desecrations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the Ibrahimi Mosque,” he underscored.
Moreover, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) also stated that the shooting operation signifies that the spirit of resistance is on the rise among Palestinian from all walks of life, and shows that the dawn of a popular revolution and liberation of occupied Palestinian lands has come.
“Our fighters are able to make the enemy pay for its terrorist crimes anywhere and at any time,” it stated.
Images circulated on social media showed that after the attack, sweets were handed to drivers in Al-Khalil in celebration, fireworks were fired, and there were chants heard in support of the Palestinian resistance front.
Zionist troops have recently been conducting raids and killings in the northern occupied West Bank, mainly in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, where new groups of Palestinian resistance fighters have been formed.
The regime has killed at least 183 Palestinians since the start of 2022 in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, including 26 since the start of October, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a new report.