[IsraelTimes] EU foreign minister warns situation in West Bank about to boil over amid stepped-up Israeli raids to dismantle terror networks
A Border Police officer was seriously maimed on Sunday during festivities with Paleostinian button men in the West Bank city of Tulkarem this morning, during which a wanted terror suspect was killed.
Undercover Border Police officers had entered Tulkarem to detain Ahmad Awfi, 36, who the IDF, Shin Bet, and police say was wanted for his involvement in several shooting attacks at troops and Israeli settlements, as well as the execution of two Paleostinians accused of spying for Israel.
A joint statement said the officers and IDF troops encircled the building where Awfi was holed up, and applied a tactic known as "pressure cooker" that involves escalating the volume of fire directed at a building to force suspects to come out.
A shootout ensued and Awfi was killed and his weapon was seized, the statement said. The IDF said troops shot up other Paleostinian button men who were shooting and hurling bombs at them.
The Israeli military said the Border Police officer sustained serious injuries in the clash and has been hospitalized.
The Paleostinian Authority Health Ministry confirmed Awfi’s death as well as that of a second man, 19-year old Nabil Atta Muhammad Amer, apparently involved in the festivities with troops.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....
’s Fatah party, identified Awfi as a local commander. His brother also called him "a member of the resistance."
The Israeli military has stepped up its near daily raids across the West Bank in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, in operations aimed at dismantling Paleostinian terror groups such as Hamas.
In a separate raid on the outskirts of Ramallah on Sunday, the IDF said troops detained a senior Hamas operative.
Since October 7, Israeli troops have arrested more than 3,100 wanted Paleostinians across the West Bank, including more than 1,350 affiliated with Hamas, according to security authorities.
The Paleostinian Authority health ministry says that more than 300 West Bank Paleostinians have been killed in that time.
Based on military estimates, the vast majority of those killed since October 7 were shot during festivities amid arrest raids, and many of them, according to data seen by The Times of Israel, were armed with either a firearm or an bomb.
The IDF is aware of at least three cases of uninvolved Paleostinians being killed by troops in recent months, and a handful of cases of settlers killing Paleostinians, which are still under investigation.
Separately, the military also said Sunday that troops had shot a suspect outside the city of Nablus who approached soldiers after getting out of a vehicle.
"Despite the soldiers calling out to the suspect and receiving no response, the suspect persisted in advancing towards them, prompting the soldiers to take action and neutralize him," a statement read.
Fatah said the man, a security officer, was "assassinated in cold blood" at the Beit Furik checkpoint outside Nablus, which is some 35 kilometres (22 miles) east of Tulkarm.
In a speech on Sunday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described the situation in the West Bank as being at boiling point and warned that "we could be on the eve of a greater explosion."
"The West Bank is the real obstacle for the two-state solution," Borrell said at the Munich Security Conference.
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