Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

2 Palestinians Shot Dead After Stabbing 2 Israeli Women

JERUSALEM — Two Palestinians were shot dead after stabbing two Israeli women on Monday in the West Bank, police said, in an emerging pattern of assaults inside Jewish settlements in the occupied territory.

One of the women was in critical condition and the other sustained moderate wounds after the attack in Beit Horon, a settlement on a highway that links Jerusalem and coastal Tel Aviv and cuts through the foothills of the West Bank.

“The two terrorists were killed by security forces,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, adding that two explosive devices were found at the scene.

It was the latest incident in an almost four-month long surge of violence that has raised concern of wider escalation, a decade after the last Palestinian uprising subsided. It followed three stabbings last week inside settlements carried out by Palestinian teenagers, according to Israeli authorities.

Many of the attacks on Israelis at the start of the bloodshed occurred in Jerusalem and other cities. But much of the violence has shifted to the West Bank, where settlers live adjacent to Palestinian population centers.

On Saturday, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, who according to an Israeli policewoman “had fought with her family and left home with a knife and intended to die,” tried to stab a security guard at a West Bank settlement and was then shot dead by him.

Since the start of October, Israeli forces have killed at least 151 Palestinians, 97 of them assailants according to authorities. Most the others have died in violent protests. Almost daily stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks by Palestinians have killed 25 Israelis and a U.S. citizen.

Many of the Palestinian assailants have been teenagers. The identities and ages of the alleged attackers on Monday were not immediately released.

On Jan. 17, an Israeli mother of six was stabbed to death at her home in a West Bank settlement and a 15-year-old Palestinian was arrested for the attack. A day later, Israeli troops shot and wounded a 17-year-old Palestinian who had stabbed and wounded a pregnant Israeli woman in a settlement.

The bloodshed has been fueled by various factors including frustration over the 2014 collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the growth of Jewish settlements on land Palestinians seek for an independent state.

Palestinian leaders have said that with no breakthrough on the horizon, desperate youngsters see no future ahead. Israel says young Palestinians are being incited to violence by their leaders and Islamist groups that call for Israel’s destruction. — Reuters

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.