NABLUS: The Israeli military said it shot and killed three alleged Palestinian gunmen in the northern occupied West Bank on Tuesday, the latest bloodshed in one of the most violent stretches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in years.
Israeli security forces said they opened fire at Palestinian militants who had shot at them from a car in the West Bank city of Nablus, the territory’s commercial capital and a major focus of the Israeli military’s recently stepped-up raids. In the hilly neighborhood of al-Tur shortly after the shooting, Israeli forces inspected a shattered black Skoda surrounded by spent bullet casings.
Palestinian media described the Israeli killing of the gunmen as an ambush following the militants’ attempted attack on Israeli forces near a Jewish settlement overlooking Nablus. The Israeli military said it confiscated three M-16 rifles and other equipment from their car.
Israeli-Palestinian fighting has surged in the territory, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians seek the occupied West Bank, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, for a hoped-for future state.
In recent months, the West Bank has witnessed a volatile mix of the rise of local armed Palestinian groups carrying out frequent shooting attacks against Israelis and near-daily Israeli military raids that have increasingly turned deadly. Earlier this month, Israel’s most forceful incursion into the West Bank in nearly two decades killed 12 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier.
Heightening tensions, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, ultranationalist coalition has rejected talks with the Palestinian leadership, sought to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and pushed for a more aggressive response to Palestinian militant attacks.
Late Monday, Palestinian militants said they opened fire at a bus carrying Israeli settlers near the Palestinian town of Hawara, just south of Nablus, without causing casualties. The Israeli military said it was setting up checkpoints to search for the suspects. A little-known armed group from the area calling itself the “Dawn Brigade” claimed responsibility for the shooting.
So far this year, over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank – the highest death toll in over a decade. Nearly half of them were affiliated with militant groups and killed in fighting during Israeli military raids, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions as well as innocent bystanders have also been killed.
Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis have killed at least 25 people this year.
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Israeli military kills 3 alleged Palestinian gunmen in volatile West Bank
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Israeli military kills 3 alleged Palestinian gunmen in volatile West Bank
- Violence in the West Bank has surged for over a year, with increased Israeli raids
- Israeli security forces said they opened fire at Palestinian militants who had shot at them from a car in the West Bank
Virtual museum preserves Sudan’s plundered heritage
CAIRO: Destroyed and looted in the early months of Sudan’s war, the national museum in Khartoum is now welcoming visitors virtually after months of painstaking effort to digitally recreate its collection.
At the museum itself, almost nothing remains of the 100,000 artefacts it had stored since its construction in the 1950s. Only the pieces too heavy for looters to haul off, like the massive granite statue of the Kush Pharaoh Taharqa and frescoes relocated from temples during the building of the Aswan Dam, are still present on site.
“The virtual museum is the only viable option to ensure continuity,” government antiquities official Ikhlass Abdel Latif said during a recent presentation of the project, carried out by the French Archaeological Unit for Sudanese Antiquities (SFDAS) with support from the Louvre and Britain’s Durham University.
When the museum was plundered following the outbreak of the war between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, satellite images showed trucks loaded with relics heading toward Darfur, the western region now totally controlled by the RSF.
Since then, searches for the missing artefacts aided by Interpol have only yielded meagre results.
“The Khartoum museum was the cornerstone of Sudanese cultural preservation — the damage is astronomical,” said SFDAS researcher Faiza Drici, but “the virtual version lets us recreate the lost collections and keep a clear record.”
Drici worked for more than a year to reconstruct the lost holdings in a database, working from fragments of official lists, studies published by researchers and photos taken during excavation missions.
Then graphic designer Marcel Perrin created a computer model that mimicked the museum’s atmosphere — its architecture, its lighting and the arrangement of its displays.
Online since January 1, the virtual museum now gives visitors a facsimile of the experience of walking through the institution’s galleries — reconstructed from photographs and the original plans — and viewing more than 1,000 pieces inherited from the ancient Kingdom of Kush.
It will take until the end of 2026, however, for the project to upload its recreation of the museum’s famed “Gold Room,” which had housed solid-gold royal jewelry, figurines and ceremonial objects stolen by looters.
In addition to the virtual museum’s documentary value, the catalogue reconstructed by SFDAS is expected to bolster Interpol’s efforts to thwart the trafficking of Sudan’s stolen heritage.
At the museum itself, almost nothing remains of the 100,000 artefacts it had stored since its construction in the 1950s. Only the pieces too heavy for looters to haul off, like the massive granite statue of the Kush Pharaoh Taharqa and frescoes relocated from temples during the building of the Aswan Dam, are still present on site.
“The virtual museum is the only viable option to ensure continuity,” government antiquities official Ikhlass Abdel Latif said during a recent presentation of the project, carried out by the French Archaeological Unit for Sudanese Antiquities (SFDAS) with support from the Louvre and Britain’s Durham University.
When the museum was plundered following the outbreak of the war between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, satellite images showed trucks loaded with relics heading toward Darfur, the western region now totally controlled by the RSF.
Since then, searches for the missing artefacts aided by Interpol have only yielded meagre results.
“The Khartoum museum was the cornerstone of Sudanese cultural preservation — the damage is astronomical,” said SFDAS researcher Faiza Drici, but “the virtual version lets us recreate the lost collections and keep a clear record.”
Drici worked for more than a year to reconstruct the lost holdings in a database, working from fragments of official lists, studies published by researchers and photos taken during excavation missions.
Then graphic designer Marcel Perrin created a computer model that mimicked the museum’s atmosphere — its architecture, its lighting and the arrangement of its displays.
Online since January 1, the virtual museum now gives visitors a facsimile of the experience of walking through the institution’s galleries — reconstructed from photographs and the original plans — and viewing more than 1,000 pieces inherited from the ancient Kingdom of Kush.
It will take until the end of 2026, however, for the project to upload its recreation of the museum’s famed “Gold Room,” which had housed solid-gold royal jewelry, figurines and ceremonial objects stolen by looters.
In addition to the virtual museum’s documentary value, the catalogue reconstructed by SFDAS is expected to bolster Interpol’s efforts to thwart the trafficking of Sudan’s stolen heritage.
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