The IDF deployed an additional infantry battalion to the southern West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday evening, following two days of attacks against soldiers and civilians, the army said.
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Israeli forces also justified the killing by stating that the Palestinian civilian attacked them with a knife. There was no immediate word on the condition of the perpetrator, who was being evacuated to hospital for treatment.
The military says soldiers shot the attacker and apprehended him.
But Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, said a wave of renewed violence that ignited previous year was “bred from almost five decades of Israeli occupation” and the result of “fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust” among Palestinians.
Thirty-five Israelis been killed in a wave of knife, gun and car-ramming attacks by Palestinians or Israeli Arabs since last October.
The unidentified man, 28, was shot dead at the scene.
Raghad Khadour, 20, detailed her reasons for joining her boyfriend – who drove a pickup truck into a group of Israelis waiting at a bus stop outside the Kiryat Arba settlement in the West Bank – in a written will, Arabic media sources said.
The incident was the fifth apparently terror-related attack of the weekend, and the third in the Hebron area.
Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Palestinian legislator, accused Israel of a “wilful policy of summary executions”.
Several of the attackers have hailed from Hebron, where around 850 Israeli settlers live in a heavily guarded enclave in the heart of a city of tens of thousands of Palestinians, with larger Jewish settlements on the city’s outskirts. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed during the same period, a lot of them identified by Israel as attackers. “Israel is flagrantly employing a systematic and willful policy of summary executions against the Palestinian people; such provocative acts are in direct violation of global law and conventions”, Ashrawi said.
Palestinian leaders say a younger generation sees no hope for the future living under Israeli security restrictions and with a stifled economy.
The uptick in violence brought to the fore the persistent tensions in the region, and came as United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon warned that the two-state solution was “further than ever” from becoming reality.
Palestinians argue that it is a result of years of frustration under Israeli occupation.
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Ban also hailed former Israeli president Shimon Peres, the last of Israel’s founding fathers who suffered a major stroke this week.
