BSS/AFP :
Violence has spiralled in Israel and the West Bank after a series of attacks inside the Jewish state since last month, prompting raids and clashes in the occupied Palestinian territory.
A total of 14 people have been killed in attacks inside Israel, most of them by Palestinians but also by Arab Israelis and a Bedouin, since March 22.
More than 20 Palestinians have been killed in the same period, including the assailants behind the anti-Israeli attacks, according to an AFP tally.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has given Israeli forces a free hand to “defeat terror” in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War. Four were killed in Beersheba.
On March 22, four people were killed when a convicted Islamic State group sympathiser goes on a stabbing and car-ramming rampage in the southern city of Beersheba in Israel’s Negev desert.
The assailant-a Bedouin man who previously tried to join IS-is shot dead by armed locals. Two policemen had been killed.On March 27, two policemen are shot dead and several others wounded in the northern Israeli city of Hadera, in an attack later claimed by IS.
Police say the two gunmen-Arab Israelis identified by Israeli intelligence as local IS operatives-are killed by counter-terrorism officers.
On March 29, five people are killed after a Palestinian from the West Bank village of Yabad opens fire at passers-by in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox Jewish city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv. A response team shoots dead the attacker.
The five victims include an Arab-Israeli police officer who was part of the team responding to the shooting. On March 31, a Palestinian man stabs an Israeli civilian with a screwdriver on a bus south of the West Bank city of Bethlehem, before a civilian shoots the assailant dead.
The same day, Israeli police kill two Palestinians, aged 17 and 23, during a raid in the West Bank city of Jenin.
A Palestinian was killed in Hebron . On April 1, Israeli forces shoot dead a Palestinian during clashes in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.The man is identified as a former detainee who spent six years in an Israeli prison.
On April 2, an Israeli raid in the West Bank kills three members of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad. Police say the three men opened fire when troops tried to arrest them near Jenin and that they were killed in the ensuing shootout.
On April 7, a Palestinian gunman kills three people and wounds more than a dozen others in a popular nightlife district of Tel Aviv.
After an all-night manhunt, Israeli police say they shot dead the Palestinian gunman, who is also from Jenin.The Israeli premier gives security agencies “full freedom” to curb the surge in violence.
On April 9, Israeli security forces raid Jenin, killing one Palestinian. Islamic Jihad says one of its fighters died during clashes. On April 10, three Palestinians are killed in different incidents across the West Bank.
Israeli forces shoot dead a Palestinian woman-identified as a widowed mother of six-near Bethlehem.The Israeli army says troops fired warning shots into the air when the woman approached them, before they “fired towards the suspect’s lower body”.
