Discussions between Palestinian and Israeli officials are likely to be disrupted this Sunday. Two young Israelis were shot dead Sunday in the northern occupied West Bank in an attack on their car, described as a “Palestinian terrorist attack” by the Israeli government. The attack happened on the main road in Huwara, near Nablus, where an AFP photographer saw Israeli soldiers deployed for search operations.
It comes as a meeting opened on Sunday in Jordan between Palestinian and Israeli leaders to try to put an end to the spiral of violence observed since the beginning of the year, after the entry into office at the end of December of the government formed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (right) with far-right allies and ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups.
Two brothers
“Two Israelis were killed in a Palestinian terrorist attack,” reads a joint statement by Binyamin Netanyahu and his Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir. “Our response to terrorism is to fight it with force and to strengthen our roots in our land”, adds the text.
The Israeli army said that a “terrorist [avait] opened fire on an Israeli vehicle” and that soldiers then cordoned off the area for search operations. The Shomron Regional Council, which manages the Jewish settlements in this area, identified the two victims as two brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, residents of the settlement of Har Bracha, close to the site of the attack, aged respectively 22 and 20 years.
Towards a law on the death penalty for terrorists
In their statement, Netanyahu and Ben Gvir announce that a ministerial committee has voted in favor of a “proposal of law opening the possibility for a court to impose the death penalty on terrorists. Orit Struck, Minister of National Missions called on Twitter “for the immediate return of the Israeli delegation” participating in the Aqaba meeting.
Since the beginning of the year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of 62 Palestinians (including members of armed groups and civilians including minors) and 11 civilians (including three minors) and one Israeli policeman as well as a Ukrainian, according to an AFP tally compiled from official Israeli and Palestinian sources.