JERUSALEM: Israeli security forces on Wednesday shot dead a Palestinian suspected in the shooting of seven Israelis including a pregnant woman whose baby later died.
The Shin Bet security service said in a statement that a suspect named as Salah Omar Barghouti, 29, who tried to evade capture during a raid on a West Bank village was shot and killed.
The statement did not say if Barghouti was suspected of being the gunman or an accomplice. It said an unspecified number of other suspects were arrested.
The Shin Bet announcement came hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that those who carried out Sunday’s drive-by shooting near a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West bank would be found and brought to justice.
He spoke shortly after a Jerusalem hospital announced the death of the baby boy, delivered by emergency caesarean section after his mother was shot. She was 30-weeks pregnant.
“We lost a few hours ago a newborn baby, four days old,” Netanyahu said in an address to foreign media.
“We will find the killers, we haven’t stopped searching. We will find them and bring them to justice,” he said.
The newborn was buried late Wednesday on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, opposite the walled Old City.
US peace envoy Jason Greenblatt said in a Twitter message that the death was “absolutely heart-breaking.”
“My thoughts & prayers are with the family of the baby who died today as a result of the despicable terror attack on Sunday,” he wrote. “This is an attack Hamas praised as ‘heroic’.”
“The world must strongly condemn this terror and not remain silent,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said in a statement.
The Hamas movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, saluted the shooting and in a statement said it proved “resistance” was still alive in the West Bank.
Following the attack the 21-year-old mother was reported as stable, but the Shaare Zedek hospital said Monday that her baby had taken a turn for the worse.
The child died “despite the medical efforts of the premature baby unit to save him,” the hospital said on Wednesday.
Palestinian attacks against Israelis occur sporadically in the West Bank.
Sunday’s shooting north of Jerusalem was the most serious attack in the West Bank since October 7, when Palestinian Ashraf Naalwa shot two Israelis dead in an industrial zone for a nearby settlement.
Israeli forces kill Palestinian suspected over West Bank shooting
Israeli forces kill Palestinian suspected over West Bank shooting
- The statement did not say if Barghouti was suspected of being the gunman or an accomplice
Trump says Iran government change ‘best thing that could happen’
- US president's comments come after he ordered a second aircraft carrier to head to the Middle East
FORT BRAGG, United States: US President Donald Trump said a change of government in Iran would be the “best thing that could happen,” as he ordered a second aircraft carrier to head to the Middle East.
“Seems like that would be the best thing that could happen,” Trump told reporters at the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina when a journalist asked if he wanted “regime change” in Iran.
“For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking. In the meantime, we’ve lost a lot of lives while they talk,” he told reporters.
Trump declined to say who he would want to take over in Iran from supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but he added that “there are people.”
He has previously backed off full-throated calls for a change of government in Iran, warning that it could cause chaos, although he has made threats toward Khamenei in the past.
Speaking earlier at the White House, Trump said that the USS Gerald R. Ford — the world’s largest warship — would be “leaving very soon” for the Middle East to up the pressure on Iran.
“In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it,” Trump said.
The giant vessel is currently in the Caribbean following the US overthrow of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Another carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is one of 12 US ships already in the Middle East.
When Iran began its crackdown on protests last month — which rights groups say killed thousands — Trump initially said that the United States was “locked and loaded” to help demonstrators.
But he has recently focused his military threats on Tehran’s nuclear program, which US forces struck last July during Israel’s unprecedented 12-day war with Iran.
The protests have subsided for now but US-based Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, urged international intervention to support the Iranian people.
“We are asking for a humanitarian intervention to prevent more innocent lives being killed in the process,” he told the Munich Security Conference.
It followed a call by the opposition leader, who has not returned to his country since before the revolution, for Iranians at home and abroad to continue demonstrations this weekend.
Iran and the United States, who have had no diplomatic relations since shortly after the revolution, held talks on the nuclear issue last week in Oman. No dates have been set for new talks yet.
The West fears the program is aimed at making a bomb, which Tehran denies.
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, said Friday that reaching an accord with Iran on inspections of its processing facilities was possible but “terribly difficult.”
Trump said after talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week that he wanted to continue talks with Iran, defying pressure from his key ally for a tougher stance.
The Israeli prime minister himself expressed skepticism at the quality of any agreement if it didn’t also cover Iran’s ballistic missiles and support for regional proxies.
According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, 7,008 people, mostly protesters, were killed in the recent crackdown, although rights groups warn the toll is likely far higher.
More than 53,000 people have also been arrested, it added.
The Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) NGO said “hundreds” of people were facing charges linked to the protests that could see them sentenced to death.
Figures working within the Iranian system have also been arrested, with three politicians detained this week from the so-called reformist wing of Iranian politics supportive of President Masoud Pezeshkian.
The three — Azar Mansouri, Javad Emam and Ebrahim Asgharzadeh — were released on bail Thursday and Friday, their lawyer Hojjat Kermani told the ISNA news agency.
