TEL AVIV, March 27: Two international observers, a Turkish man and a Swiss woman, were shot dead in the southern West Bank on Tuesday night, becoming the latest victims of the bloody Middle East conflict.

Another member of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) was wounded in the shooting near the Palestinian village of Halhul, north of Al Khalil, the Israeli army said.

The observers were “mistakenly” targeted near a road used by Jewish settlers, Israeli television quoted military sources as saying.

A military spokesman confirmed the account and said that a military doctor had treated the injured observer on the scene.

The Palestinian leadership blamed Israel for the killings, saying the “Israeli army bears full responsibility for this crime”.

The leadership accused the army in a statement of having “opened fire on the car in which the three TIPH members were traveling”.

Turkish consul Huseyin Avni Bicakci said in an interview with a television news channel in a live broadcast that two Turkish and two Swiss observers had come under fire from unidentified gunmen while travelling in a vehicle near Al Khalil.

The slain Turk was identified as Major Cengiz Soytunc, while the other Turkish observer, Hussein Ozarslan, was hospitalized in critical condition with three bullet wounds, Bicakci said. The second Swiss observer suffered light wounds, he added.

The Swiss victim of the attack was a woman, Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, Ahmet Uzumcu, told the same channel.

Israeli public television had initially announced that the observers were Norwegian.

The TIPH, whose mandate is renewed every six months, consists of observers from Norway, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland.

They are deployed in the flashpoint West Bank city in line with an Israeli-Palestinian agreement reached after the 1994 massacre by an Israeli settler of 29 Palestinians.—AFP