Israel Kills Palestinian in West Bank Checkpoint Shooting
Image by getty images
Israeli troops on Tuesday shot dead a Palestinian who the military said had opened fire and wounded a soldier at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian mainstream Fatah group identified the man as Alaa Odeh, a 30-year-old mobile phone shop owner, and along with relatives accused soldiers of killing him in cold blood.
In a statement, the military said “a Palestinian gunman opened fire and wounded a border policemen, and the force returned fire, killing the perpetrator”.
It posted on Twitter a photograph of a pistol on the ground and said the attacker had fired six shots. Odeh’s family was quoted as saying in media reports that he was at the checkpoint awaiting a delivery of phones.
The night-time incident came hours after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas swore in a new unity government, healing a rift with Hamas Islamists in Gaza, and raising tensions with Israel.
The shooting occurred at the same checkpoint where troops, four days ago, arrested a Palestinian who the military said was wearing an explosives belt.
U.S.-led peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians collapsed in April and some analysts have warned of a possible spike in violence given the lack of any clear way forward to resolve the generations-old conflict.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
