A Palestinian motorist has driven a truck into pedestrians at a busy checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, wounding three people.
The violence on Thursday comes a day after Israeli police shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who stabbed a man in a Jerusalem light railway station, and after Palestinian militants detonated a bomb near a convoy of Israeli troops escorting Jewish worshippers to a holy site in the occupied West Bank, wounding four soldiers.
The unrest is part of more than a year long wave of violence that has scared to levels unseen in the West Bank in about two decades.
Israeli paramedics said they were treating three people, one critically injured, after the attack.
According to Israel’s defence ministry, the driver sped away but was stopped by security guards at a checkpoint nearby. The driver’s condition was not immediately clear.
The checkpoint where the incident occurred is on a highway leading from central Israel through the West Bank and into Jerusalem and is next to the Israeli city of Modi’in. The checkpoint is typically packed with commuters and security guards or soldiers.
Palestinian assaults against Israelis have risen alongside Israel’s intensification of arrest raids in the West Bank since last spring. About 30 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks against Israelis this year.
The near-nightly raids have fuelled tensions in the region and ushered in some of the worst fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank since the Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.
Nearly 180 Palestinians have been killed in the violence. Israel says most of those killed have been militants but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions as well as people not involved in the confrontations were among the dead.