Palestinian trucker kills Israeli soldier in ramming, is shot

Truck driver rammed his vehicle near a checkpoint in the West Bank, injuring three people before he was "neutralised" in the latest attack to rock the occupied territory. (AFP)

• Violence comes a day after Israeli police shot and killed 14-year-old Palestinian boy who stabbed man in Jerusalem

TEL AVIV, Israel: A Palestinian truck driver killed an Israeli soldier and injured two others in a ramming attack on a checkpoint on the boundary with the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Israeli police and medical officials said.
The driver was shot and wounded by troops following a pursuit between Maccabim checkpoint and the Palestinian village of Nilin, a police commander said. The commander described the driver as a 41-year-old who had a permit to work in Israel.
The militant group Hamas, which has stepped up attacks in the West Bank in a challenge to Israel and the internationally backed Palestinian Authority, described the incident as an “heroic operation” but did not claim credit.
The violence comes a day after Israeli police shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who stabbed a man in a Jerusalem light-rail station and after Palestinian militants detonated a bomb near a convoy of Israeli troops escorting Jewish worshippers to a holy site in the occupied West Bank, wounding four Israeli troops.
The unrest is part of more than a yearlong wave of violence that has surged to levels unseen in the West Bank in some two decades.
According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, the driver sped away from the area and was stopped by security guards at a separate checkpoint nearby.
Palestinian assaults against Israelis have spiked alongside Israel’s intensification of arrest raids in the West Bank since last spring. Some 30 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of 2023.
The near-nightly raids have fueled tensions in the region and have ushered in some of the worst fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank since the last Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.
Nearly 180 Palestinians have been killed in the violence. Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions as well as people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.