Palestinians have protested against Israeli forces killing of a man after car-ramming operation near the city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank.

Shops, businesses, institutions and schools remained closed in the town of al-Ezariya and much of nearby areas on Monday, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency reported.

On Sunday, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian who allegedly left five settlers injured near the city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank. The regime’s forces fatally shot the man who was driving the car south of Jericho. Later in the day, the Palestinian Health Ministry identified the man as Barakat Moussa Odeh, 49, from the village of al-Ezariya.

Israeli media said the driver first rammed some Israelis near Nabi Musa village and then continued driving and plowed into a bus stop at Almog Junction.

Following the incident, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issued a statement, hailing “the heroic operation” in the West Bank. The front said the episode “renewed the emphasis on the need to confront the occupation and its continuing crimes.”

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas also welcomed the operation. It said six Israeli soldiers and settlers had been wounded.

The reported attack came amid increasingly intensified Israeli raids throughout the West Bank in search of armed Palestinian resistance fighters responsible for a spate of deadly attacks on Israeli forces, which began in March.

More than 100 Palestinians have so far been killed during the Israeli regime’s brutal crackdown on the West Bank’s native residents over the past few months.

Palestinians say Israelis must be held accountable for their atrocities.
The Israeli regime occupied and annexed the West Bank, including East al-Quds, in a Western-backed war of aggression in 1967. Ever since, it has dotted the territory with hundreds of settlements that have come to house hundreds of thousands of Zionist settlers that immigrated to occupied Palestine – mostly from Europe and the United States.

Palestinians want the occupied West Bank as part of their future independent state with East al-Quds as its capital. 

Separately on Monday, Israeli prison forces violently stormed the notorious Ofer jail and attacked Palestinian prisoners while conducting ‘search operations’, Palestinian media reported. 

The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) said Israeli forces assaulted several prisoners in section 14 of the jail. Eighty-five newly-detained Palestinian prisoners are held in the section, the PPS said.

Overall, more than 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly held in Israeli jails. The prisoners are kept under deplorable conditions lacking proper hygienic standards. They have also been subjected to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.

The Palestine Detainees Studies Center says about 60% of the prisoners suffer from chronic diseases, a number of whom died in detention or after being released due to the severity of their cases.