Israeli attacks in West Bank killed at least eight people, officials and residents say

A series of Israeli raids and airstrikes in towns and villages in the occupied West Bank that stretched overnight from Monday into late Tuesday have killed at least eight people, according to Palestinian authorities and local residents.

Qatari-owned Al Araby TV alleged that Israeli fire in Qabatya also injured a Palestinian employee working there. Rabe’e Al-Munir, a photojournalist, is now hospitalized in stable condition, it said.

The bloodshed comes as violence surges in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has intensified incursions following the Hamas-led October 7 attacks.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 775 Palestinians, including 167 children, in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, the Palestinian health ministry reported on Tuesday.

Earlier on Monday, Israeli settlers vandalized and set fire to vehicles in the city of Al-Bireh, in what Ramallah governor Laila Ghannam warned “could have ended in a massacre.”

The West Bank, a territory that lies between Israel and Jordan, is home to 3.3 million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, as well as hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis who began settling there some 57 years ago.

In total, nearly 1,600 settler attacks against Palestinians have been recorded since October 7, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on October 31.