Three people shot dead at West Bank-Jordan border crossing
8 September 2024, 16:24
The military said the gunman approached in a truck from Jordan and opened fire at Israeli security forces, who killed the assailant in a shootout.
Three Israelis were shot dead at the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan on Sunday, Israeli officials said, in what appeared to be an attack linked to the 11-month-old war in Gaza.
The military said the gunman approached the Allenby Bridge crossing from the Jordanian side in a truck and opened fire at Israeli security forces, who killed the assailant in a shootout. It said the three people killed were Israeli civilians.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said the three people who were killed were men in their 50s.
Jordan is investigating the shooting, its state-run Petra News Agency reported. The Western-allied Arab country made peace with Israel in 1994 but is fiercely critical of its policies toward the Palestinians. The Allenby crossing is mainly used by Israelis, Palestinians and international tourists.
Jordan has a large Palestinian population and has seen mass protests against Israel over the war in Gaza.
Authorities in Israel and Jordan said the crossing has been closed until further notice, and Israel later announced the closure of both of its land crossings with Jordan, near Beit Shean in the north and Eilat in the south.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack and linked it to Israel’s larger conflict with Iran and allied militant groups, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen a surge of violence since Hamas’s October 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there.
Israel has launched near-daily military arrest raids into dense Palestinian residential areas, and there has also been a rise in settler violence and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, an Israeli air strike early on Sunday killed five people, including two women, two children and a senior official in the Civil Defence – first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government.
The Civil Defence said the strike targeted the home of its deputy director for north Gaza, Mohammed Morsi, in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. The army says it tries to avoid harming civilians and only targets militants.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war erupted 11 months ago. It does not say how many were fighters and how many civilians.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the October 7 attack on Israel.
They abducted another 250, and are still holding around 100 of them after releasing most of the rest in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel during a weeklong ceasefire last November.
Around a third of the remaining hostages inside Gaza are believed to be dead.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have spent months trying to broker a ceasefire and the return of the hostages, but the negotiations have repeatedly bogged down.
