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RAMALLAH, West Bank: The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces shot and killed a 16-year-old Palestinian early Wednesday during a nighttime raid in the occupied West Bank.
The ministry said Ahmed Shehada was killed by an Israeli bullet that hit his chest. Four other Palestinians were wounded during the army raid in Nablus city, one seriously, it said.
The Israeli military said it had no immediate comment.
Meanwhile, Palestinians withheld the body of an Israeli civilian who was killed in a car accident in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, local media reported.
According to the Israeli military, two Israelis entered the city and were taken to a Palestinian hospital following the crash, with one of them dying and the second in serious condition.
The injured man was transferred to an Israeli hospital for further treatment, but the body of the one who died was not, the military said. “The body was taken from the hospital in Jenin and is expected to be returned to Israel shortly, as a required humanitarian act,” the military said, without elaborating.
The dead person was a high school student from an Israeli minority group, it added.
Violence in the West Bank has surged over the past several months as Israel has ramped up arrest raids after a spate of Palestinian attacks within Israel killed 19 people last spring. At least another 10 Israelis were killed in recent attacks. During the same period, more than 130 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. Israel says most of those killed have been militants. But youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in the fighting have also been killed.
Israel says its almost nightly arrest raids in the West Bank are needed to dismantle militant networks at a time when Palestinian security forces are unable or unwilling to do so. The Palestinians say the raids undermine their security forces and are aimed at cementing Israel’s open-ended 55-year occupation of lands they want for their hoped-for state.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, and has since maintained a military occupation over the territory and settled more than 500,000 people there. The Palestinians seek the territory, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, for their hoped-for independent state.