A Palestinian man was killed when an explosion ripped through his metal workshop in a village on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the West Bank on Sunday, Palestinian security officials told AFP.
Omar Abu Zeid, 28, an alleged member of the Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad, was killed in the blast, which officials said could have been caused by a bomb he was preparing.
His death brought to 966 the number of people killed in the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising against 34 years of Israeli occupation, that broke out last September. They include 756 Palestinians and 188 Israelis, according to AFP’s tally.
Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper quoted Israel’s Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer as telling a meeting of the cabinet Sunday that the Israeli army would not withdraw its forces from the West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarem at present, claiming the army had received warnings of terror attacks originating from those cities.
The defense minister said that there had been a decline in the number of attacks over the past few days, but claimed that the Palestinians were making an extra effort to carry out attacks that were more lethal.
In another development, a Palestinian man was wounded Saturday afternoon when an explosive device he was allegedly planting on the road leading to the Gaza Strip settlement of Neve Dekalim exploded. He was taken to Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva.
The occupation army entered Palestinian-controlled Area A in the early hours of Saturday morning and snatched 12 Palestinians.
The Israeli troops demolished the house of Nader Mohammed Hamdar, a Fateh activist who carried out a shooting attack in the Afula bus station approximately one month ago.
Meanwhile, Haaretz said that the Israeli police have yet to find four Palestinians who were allegedly smuggled into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Thursday. Police believe that one of the men may be in Be'er Sheva and the other three in the Lahish region.
In a related development, the official Palestinian news agency (WAFA) reported that Jewish settlers set on fire a car belonging to a Palestinian man in the south of the West Bank city of Nablus.
The agency quoted eyewitnesses as saying that a number of armed settlers gathered after midnight Saturday on the road linking Nablus and Ramallah before they attacked a nearby village, “while soldiers were watching.”
According to the UK-based magazine The Economist, Israel has "flouted" the 1993 Oslo peace accords by settling thousands of it citizens on land seized from Palestinians in 1967 – Albawaba.com
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