TEL AVIV, March 3: A lone Palestinian sniper gunned down 10 Israelis, including seven soldiers, at a checkpoint in the West Bank on Sunday, in another blow to the army’s morale, military sources said.
Another soldier was killed in the Gaza Strip, while four Palestinians were killed in clashes elsewhere in the West Bank.
The hilltop sniper fired just 25 bullets as he calmly picked off the Israelis at the army roadblock with a World War II vintage rifle, hitting 14 people in all, near the Jewish settlement of Ofra, to the east of Ramallah.
The army said the sniper shot dead three soldiers, followed by a paramedic and another soldier who arrived on the scene, two settlers waiting in their car at the roadblock, and then two more soldiers before making his escape.
Another settler died soon afterward, while four Israelis were wounded.
The dead soldiers, five of them in their 20s, were all officers or senior NCOs, the Israeli army said.
In a separate attack on Sunday, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier died in hospital after coming under automatic fire near a checkpoint at Kissoufim, between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Three other soldiers were wounded.
The attack was claimed in a joint statement in Damascus by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, and Islamic Jihad’s Jerusalem Brigades.
Israeli units later moved two kilometres into the area, Palestinian security sources said, while more than 25 tanks and other military vehicles were seen entering the Gaza Strip at Kissoufim and heading south.
The Martyrs Brigades had earlier claimed responsibility for a suicide blast in occupied Al Quds on Saturday, when nine Israelis were killed and about 50 others wounded.
As Israel mounted its riposte, Palestinian policeman Abdallah Sabet, 22, was killed when tanks shelled the autonomous village of Salfit, south of Nablus, medical sources said.
Another policeman, Amer Zeki, 21, was killed and 18 other Palestinians wounded, one critically, when Israeli troops and tanks went into action in Ramallah.
Two members of the Palestinian intelligence services were shot dead during a brief incursion by two Israeli tanks into the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, Palestinian security and hospital sources said.
Khaled Sawalha, 24, and Islam Shawahna, 26, were killed by Israeli fire in the autonomous Palestinian town, close to the border with Israel, the sources said.
Earlier Hakam Abu Aisha, a 17-year-old member of the Palestinian security forces, died of wounds received on Thursday during the army’s incursion into the refugee camp of Jenin in the northern West Bank, hospital sources said.
The deaths raised to 1,338 the number of people killed since the Palestinian intifada.
Also in the Gaza Strip, a convoy of Israeli vehicles came under fire on a road between the Jewish settlement of Netzarim and the Karni crossing point, which caused no casualties, a military source said.
That attack was also claimed by the Al Aqsa Martyrs and Jerusalem Brigades.—AFP
TEL AVIV, March 3: A lone Palestinian sniper gunned down 10 Israelis, including seven soldiers, at a checkpoint in the West Bank on Sunday, in another blow to the army’s morale, military sources said.
