RAMALLAH: Palestinian health officials said on Sunday that Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, an incident the Israeli military said it was reviewing.
The Health Ministry in Ramallah said the Palestinian body that coordinates with Israeli authorities had informed it that Israeli fire had killed Shaker Falah Ahmad Al-Jaabari, 58, on Saturday evening.
The ministry said Israeli forces were still holding Al-Jaabari’s body.
Late on Saturday, the Israeli military said its troops had responded to a “threat and opened fire at the terrorist who attempted to run them over.
Hours later, however, the military said in a separate statement that investigators had found “no conclusive findings (to) indicate that the incident constituted an intentional terror attack,” adding the case remained under investigation.
Violence has surged across the West Bank since the war in Gaza broke out in October 2023 after an unprecedented attack by Hamas on Israel.
At least 1,029 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since the war started, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Some 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory, along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war.
Their presence is viewed by most of the international community as illegal and a major obstacle to peace.
The Palestinians seek all three areas for a future state.
Over two dozen families from one of the few remaining Palestinian Bedouin villages in the central West Bank have packed up and fled their homes in recent days, saying harassment by Jewish settlers living in unauthorized outposts nearby has grown unbearable.
The village, Ras Ein El-Auja, was originally home to some 700 people from more than 100 families that have lived there for decades.
Twenty-six families already left on Thursday, scattering across the territory in search of safer ground, rights groups say. Several other families were packing up and leaving on Sunday.
“We have been suffering greatly from the settlers. Every day, they come on foot, or on tractors, or on horseback with their sheep into our homes. They enter people’s homes daily,” said Nayef Zayed, a resident, as neighbors took down sheep pens and tin structures.
Other residents pledged to stay put for the time being. That makes them some of the last Palestinians left in the area, said Sarit Michaeli, international director at B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group helping the residents.
She said that mounting settler violence has already emptied neighboring Palestinian hamlets in the dusty corridor of land stretching from Ramallah in the West to Jericho, along the Jordanian border, in the east.
The area is part of the 60 percent of the West Bank that has remained under full Israeli control under the interim peace accords signed in the 1990s.
Since October 2023, over 2,000 Palestinians — at least 44 entire communities — have been expelled by settler violence in the area, B’Tselem says.
The turning point for the village came in December, when settlers put up an outpost about 50 meters (yards) from Palestinian homes on the northwestern flank of the village, said Michaeli and Sam Stein, an activist who has been living in the village for a month.
Settlers strolled easily through the village at night. Sheep and laundry went missing. International activists had to begin escorting children to school to keep them safe.
“The settlers attack us day and night, they have displaced us, they harass us in every way,” said Eyad Isaac, another resident.
“They intimidate the children and women.”
Michaeli said she has witnessed settlers walk around the village at night, going into homes to film women and children and tampering with the village’s electricity.
The residents said they call the police frequently to ask for help — but it seldom arrives.
Settlement expansion has been promoted by successive Israeli governments over nearly six decades.
But Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has placed settler leaders in senior positions, has made it a top priority.
That growth has been accompanied by a spike in settler violence, much of it carried out by residents of unauthorized outposts.
These outposts often begin with small farms or shepherding that are used to seize land, say Palestinians and anti-settlement activists.
UN officials warn the trend is changing the map of the West Bank, entrenching Israeli presence in the area.
For now, displaced families from the village have dispersed to other villages near the city of Jericho and Hebron, further south, residents said.
Some sold their sheep and are trying to move into the cities.
Others are just dismantling their structures without knowing where to go.
“Where will we go? There’s nowhere. We’re scattered,” said Zayed, the resident, “People’s situation is bad. Very bad.”
