A female IDF soldier in her 20s was struck by a car at the Migron-Kochav Yaakov intersection in the West Bank in a terror attack on Tuesday morning.
The soldier was seriously wounded with head injuries and evacuated in stable condition to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center by Magen David Adom medical services personnel in order to receive further medical treatment.
The alleged attacker was shot and killed by police officers who were at the scene following a short chase.
He was identified as 45-year-old Rani Mamoun Faiz Abu Ali from Beitounia. Married and the father of five children, he had an Israeli work permit and was employed at the Rami Levy supermarket in the Sha’ar Binyamin industrial zone.
Police and military forces were at the scene scanning for possible accomplices.
Video of the attack showed a black SUV backing up before turning around as the soldier walked from a parking lot onto a sidewalk. Abu Ali then accelerated onto the sidewalk before hitting the soldier and fleeing the scene on the highway. The IDF said that the injured soldier’s family has been notified of the attack.
Cracking down on Palestinian terror in the West Bank
The attack comes as senior commanders in the IDF have said they are not optimistic about the violence and fear a further escalation in the West Bank. The past year has seen a marked increase in terrorism, with 281 serious terror attacks by Palestinians – 239 against soldiers and 42 against Israeli civilians.
The military launched Operation Break the Wave to crack down on Palestinian terror after a series of deadly terror attacks killed 20 people in Israel. In the over six months since it began, two soldiers and two officers have been killed during operations and another 15 civilians have been killed in attacks.
Thousands of troops and reservists have been cracking down on Palestinian terrorism, arresting over 3,000 suspects and thwarting over 500 terror attacks. The operations in the West Bank have been the deadliest since 2016, with 140 Palestinians killed in the past year, five of them on Sunday alone. The numbers marked a significant increase, almost doubling from 73 in 2021 and rising seven-fold from 20 in 2020.
Overnight clashes in the central West Bank led to three Palestinian deaths and numerous others injured, in addition to a Palestinian man who was killed Sunday evening.
The man, identified as Raed Ghazi Na‘ssan, was shot in the chest after clashes erupted in the village of al-Mughayyir village near Ramallah. According to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, dozens of Palestinians began throwing stones at troops who were distributing demolition orders for illegal construction in the town.
Three men were killed by troops earlier in the morning. Two brothers – Jawad and Thafer Abdul Rahman Rimawi – were killed in the village of Kufr Ein near Ramallah, and Mufeed Mohammed Ikhlil was shot in the head during clashes near Beit Ummar near Hebron.
Ikhlil was killed when a firefight erupted after two IDF jeeps got stuck in the village and IDF forces came to rescue them. In a statement, the military said that Palestinians threw blocks and Molotov cocktails toward the troops, who responded by using live fire and riot dispersal methods.
The military says that the high number of Palestinian deaths stems from the fact that a massive amount of gunfire is directed toward troops during raids, leading them to fire back and often killing the gunmen.