2 Israelis injured in car-ramming attack in southern West Bank

By Awad Rjoub and Said Amori

JERUSALEM (AA) – Two Israeli soldiers were injured, one critically, when an unknown person on Saturday rammed his vehicle into Israeli security forces near the city of Hebron in the occupied southern West Bank and sped away.

The Israeli army said in a statement that a car-ramming attack “took place in the al-Fawwar area in the southern West Bank, and the perpetrator fled the scene, with forces now pursuing him.”

The statement confirmed that the two injured were soldiers.

The Israeli army medical teams treated a man in his 30s with serious limb injuries and evacuated a 45-year-old man with “shrapnel injuries," Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported, citing Israel's national emergency service official Magen David Adom.

Separately, eyewitnesses told Anadolu that the Israeli army stormed the town of Dura, southwest of Hebron, shortly after the car-ramming attack at its eastern entrance.

According to the witnesses, “Israeli forces raided neighborhoods in the town center, searched one of the houses, and closed both the eastern and southern entrances of the town, as well as the entrances to several nearby villages to the south.”

The Israeli military has conducted regular raids in the West Bank in recent years, which have increased in intensity with the onset of the war on Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. Palestinians have also been brutally attacked by illegal Israeli settlers.

At least 807 Palestinians have since been killed and over 6,450 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory, according to the Health Ministry.

The escalation follows a landmark opinion in July by the International Court of Justice that declared Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian land "illegal" and demanded the evacuation of all existing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

*Writing by Rania Abu Shamala