A rare homemade bomb attack in the occupied West Bank killed an Israeli teen and seriously wounded her father and brother Friday as they visited a spring near a Jewish settlement, officials said. Israeli security forces deployed throughout the area where the attack took place near the settlement of Dolev, northwest of Ramallah, to search for suspects.
Israeli medics had earlier reported that a 17-year-old had been critically wounded in the attack and officials later announced her death, naming her as Rina Shnerb from the central Israeli city of Lod. Medics from the Magen David Adom rescue service initially gave the ages of the two wounded as 46 and 20, before amending to 21 in the latter case. The army said the three victims were a father and his two children.
The two wounded were taken by helicopter to hospital, the army said. "Three civilians who were in a nearby spring were injured in an IED (improvised explosive device) blast," it said in a statement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a "harsh terrorist attack" and sent condolences to the family, while pledging to continue building settlements.
"The security arms are in pursuit after the abhorrent terrorists," he said in a statement. "We will apprehend them. The long arm of Israel reaches all those who seek our lives and will settle accounts with them." United Nations envoy Nickolay Mladenov condemned the "shocking, heinous" attack, saying there was nothing heroic in Shnerb's "murder", calling it a "despicable, cowardly act". "Terror must be unequivocally condemned by ALL," Mladenov wrote on Twitter.
Israeli forces meanwhile entered the Palestinian village of Beitunia, south of the spring, to take footage from surveillance cameras. An AFP reporter said Palestinians clashed there with Israeli soldiers, but no casualties were reported. Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Aviv Kohavi visited the site of the attack to understand the incident and oversee the efforts to locate the perpetrators, which he was "confident" would happen quickly, the military said.
Later in the day, Shnerb was buried in her hometown Lod, with thousands participating in the funeral. Shnerb's father Eitan, who was wounded and couldn't attend the funeral, relayed through an uncle his request that people focus on "our strength and love and the wonderful nation and our good land" and avoid sinking into "weakness and anger and strife". "We should be worthy of the great sacrifice we offered today," Eitan Shnerb was cited by the uncle as saying.
In a speech on Friday, Ismail Haniya, the leader of the Islamist Hamas movement which rules Gaza, praised the attack but did not claim responsibility for it. He referred to a recent clash between Israeli police and Palestinian worshippers at the highly sensitive Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and sought to draw a link between the two incidents.
AFP reporters said thousands of Gazans participated in weekly Friday protests at the Israeli border fence, with some youths using slingshots to launch stones at the barrier and a few approaching it. The health ministry in the enclave said over 122 Palestinians were wounded in clashes with Israeli forces, dozens of them hit by live fire. Palestinians sporadically clash with Israeli settlers and security forces in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967, but bomb blasts have been rare in recent years.
Comments
Comments are closed.