Israelis Injured, 3 Assailants Killed in 3 Seperate West Bank Attacks

The incidents have been the newest in a 3 month-long wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence & came as revelers have been gathering within the West Bank city of Bethlehem for Christmas celebrations.

The attacks all took place on Thursday morning and early afternoon in different West Bank locations.

A third victim, who was stabbed multiple times in the attack, remains in serious condition.

Many of the Palestinians killed have been attackers while others have been shot dead by Israeli security forces during clashes. Police was investigating a video which had surfaced on social media which appeared to show a man beating one of the shot assailants with a pole Jerusalem police spokesman Asi Aharoni told Army Radio.

One of the assailants was killed at the scene; the other died of his wounds in hospital.

Israeli soldiers work around the body of a Palestinian assailant after he was shoot dead in the West Bank city of Hebron, Thursday, Dec. 24, 2015.

On Wednesday, two Israeli Jews were killed in a knife attack near the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The figure includes 26 children, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health. There are reports a second Israeli was killed, caught in police gunfire aimed at the attackers.

Palestinians are frustrated by Israel’s 48-year occupation and with peace talks going nowhere.

A campaign of stabbings, shootings and car-rammings by Palestinians in recent months has killed 19 Israelis and a US citizen.

Bloodshed has also been triggered by Muslim opposition to stepped-up Israeli access to Jerusalem’s al Aqsa mosque complex.

The boy and his parents died when their home in the village of Duma in the occupied West Bank was set ablaze in July in an incident Israeli officials described as “Jewish terrorism”.

Young Jewish men from wildcat settlement outposts in the West Bank and known as the “hilltop youth” have been blamed for violence and vandalism targeting Palestinians, Christian holy sites and even Israeli military property.

The Shin Bet, in a rare statement, denied on Thursday it had tortured any of the suspects and said “the lies were being disseminated in an effort to undermine the investigation”.