The United Nations refugee agency (UNRWA) announced on Friday the death of one of its employees, killed in the West Bank during a raid by the Israeli army, according to which he was shot after having “thrown explosive devices”.
At the end of August, the Israeli army launched a vast offensive in the north of the West Bank, where armed groups fighting against Israel, which has occupied the Palestinian territory for 57 years, are particularly active.
Dozens of Palestinians, including several members of armed groups, but also civilians, teenagers and the elderly, were killed according to Palestinian sources, in this operation described as “anti-terrorist” by the Israeli army.
On Friday, UNRWA said in a statement that Sofiane Jaber Abed Jawwad had been killed during the night from Wednesday to Thursday in the Faraa refugee camp (north).
“This is the first time that an UNRWA employee has been killed in the West Bank in more than ten years,” she stressed.
According to UNRWA, Sofiane Jaber Abed Jawwad was a “road worker”, married and father of five children. He was buried on Friday, according to an AFP journalist present at the funeral.
On X, an Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said that Abed Jawwad was throwing “explosive devices” and was “a threat” to soldiers operating in the Faraa area. Soldiers “opened fire in his direction (…) and he was killed.”
“The terrorist was later identified and it was discovered that he was also an employee of UNRWA,” the officer added, claiming that he was known to the security services for having been “complicit in other terrorist activities.”
The Israeli army had earlier indicated that it had “carried out a 48-hour anti-terrorist operation” in the areas of Toubas, Tamoune and Faraa, in the north of the West Bank, killing “five armed terrorists” in an air strike and a sixth in “exchanges of fire” with “a terrorist who threw explosive devices”.
Israel has stepped up deadly raids in the occupied West Bank since the unprecedented attack by Hamas on Israeli soil, which triggered the war in the Gaza Strip on October 7, where according to UNRWA, more than 220 of its employees have been killed since the start of hostilities, including six on Wednesday.
– Funeral –
In the West Bank, at least 679 Palestinians have been killed since October 7 by gunfire from Israeli soldiers or settlers, according to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and at least 24 Israelis, including soldiers, have died in Palestinian attacks or military operations, according to official Israeli data.
Relatives of Palestinians killed in an airstrike in Toubas held funerals on Friday after Israeli forces withdrew following a raid in the area, AFP reported.
The Israeli army said on Wednesday that it was carrying out “anti-terrorist operations in the regions of Toubas and Tamoune” and that one of its planes had “struck a terrorist cell” in the Toubas area.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the army withdrew on Thursday evening, allowing the funeral to take place.
The four men buried in Toubas on Friday were killed by an airstrike at dawn on Wednesday, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. A fifth man killed by the same strike was buried on Friday in Tamoune, also in the northern West Bank.
On Friday morning, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Toubas alongside the four bodies, which were placed on stretchers and wrapped in white shrouds. Some waved the green flag of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, and gunshots punctuated the songs of mourners.
“I woke up in the morning to the sound of an explosion,” Ahmed Sawafta, the father of one of the dead men, told AFP, describing Wednesday’s strike. “My brothers came and told me that Yassin had been martyred,” he added, referring to his son.
bur-feb/hme
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