A Palestinian teenager was killed on Monday April 10 during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank, in the context of a new outbreak of violence in the Middle East.
The Israeli army said in a brief statement that “Security forces were carrying out an operation in Aqabat Jaber”a Palestinian refugee camp near Jericho. “During an operation to arrest a suspect… violent clashes broke out at different points… the soldiers fired live ammunition”said the army, which said it had arrested the suspect.
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Israel, a country fractured since Netanyahu’s alliance with the far right
The Palestinian Health Ministry reported the death of 15-year-old Mohamed Fayez Balhan, “killed by live ammunition of the occupation” after being shot in the head and chest. The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas denounced a “summary execution (Mohamed Balhan) by Israeli occupying forces in a raid in the occupied West Bank”.
This new Israeli military operation comes the day after the funeral of two young Israeli women killed Friday in a Palestinian attack, in the area of Jericho. The mother of the two girls, an Israeli-British woman also injured on Friday, died of her injuries, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem said Monday. President Isaac Hertzog offered his condolences to the family “in the name of all the Israeli people”.
Tensions after the irruption of Israeli forces in a mosque
Deadly attacks, rocket attacks from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, followed by Israeli reprisals: the region has been plagued by a wave of violence since the brutal irruption on Wednesday of Israeli forces in the Al-Aqsa mosque of Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, prompting a series of condemnations and a sudden flare-up of tensions.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces twice burst into the Al-Aqsa mosque and dislodged the faithful gathered for night prayers, in the middle of Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting coinciding in recent days with the celebrations of Jewish and Christian Easter.
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Israel claims that the security forces were “forced to act to restore order” in the face of “extremists” barricaded in the mosque with rocks and firework flares which were used against the police during their assault.
“Israel is threatened with a journey into darkness”
The next day, around 30 rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel, injuring one person and causing material damage. The Israeli army retaliated by carrying out strikes in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
Nearly three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967. About 490,000 Jewish settlers also live there in settlements considered by the UN to be illegal under international law. Since the beginning of the year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of at least 94 Palestinians, 18 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian, according to an AFP tally compiled from official Israeli and Palestinian sources.
