Man killed and his wife is injured in West Bank shooting

One or more gunmen opened fire on Friday on an Israeli family travelling in a car near Hebron, killing the father and seriously wounding the mother, according to the Israeli military and news media.

Two of the couple’s children were also injured when the car overturned on a narrow highway running through the southern West Bank.

The shooting occurred a day after 13-year-old Israeli-American Hallel Yaffa Ariel was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian teenager as she slept in her bedroom in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba.

The two deadly attacks suggested that the surge in stabbings, shootings and attacks on cars that began in October has renewed its intensity.

The attackers in the latest shooting are believed to be Palestinian. Lt Col Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said a gunman in a vehicle had opened fire on another car travelling on Route 60, a narrow highway used by Palestinians and Israelis. The car was being driven between the Jewish settlements of Otniel and Beit Haggai.

Earlier on Friday, a Palestinian woman was shot dead in Hebron after police said she brandished a knife near a contentious holy site shared by Muslims and Jews, known as the Cave of the Patriarchs and the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Wafa, the Palestinian official news service, reported that the woman, Sarah Tarayreh (27), was pregnant, but gave no further details. She was from Bani Naim, the same hometown as Mohammad Tarayreh, the 19-year-old who a day earlier killed the young Israeli-American teenager in Kiryat Arba.

–(New York Times)