Palestinian Killed by Bystanders After Ramming Into Israelis

In a statement, the Israeli army said the two men who were shot had attempted to run them over with their cars.

Israeli security forces shot dead two Palestinians who tried to ram them with their cars in the West Bank on Wednesday, Israeli forces and Palestinian medical sources said.

The Palestinian health ministry confirmed the deaths of Ahmad Jahajha, 21, and Hekmat Hamdan, whose age was not disclosed.

But he also said evidence was still lacking almost five months after the July 31 firebombing in the village of Duma in the occupied West Bank despite the recent arrests of suspects in the case.

The raid was the latest round in violence that began on 1 October, with nearly daily knife, gun and car-ramming attacks carried out by the Palestinians against Israelis.

The spokesperson also warned that punitive demolitions of Palestinian houses and the withholding of bodies of alleged attackers from their families can only aggravate the situation.

One U.S. citizen and 19 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks.

The violence had come due to “the despair of young Palestinians over the lack of a political horizon for the two-state solution, the [Israeli] invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the continuation of settlement building and military checkpoint deployment”, Abbas said in Ramallah on Monday. Most Palestinians believe if the current individual attacks develop into an armed intifada, the violence might serve Palestinian national interests more than negotiations would. At least 115 Palestinians have been killed in the same period, of whom 78 Israel has identified as assailants.

At the United Nations in NY, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, told reporters that envoys of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators are now in the region for “substantive meetings” with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

In his annual pre-Christmas address, Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal, the top Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, called for calm to be restored.