Two Palestinian young men were shot dead by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on Friday, August 30, north of the city of Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank near the Israeli settlements of Gush Etzion and Karmei Tzur.
The slain young men were identified as Mohammad Ihsan Yaqin Maraqa and Zuhdi Nidal Abu Afifa, and had just carried out bomb attacks against illegal Israeli settlements. Their car bomb attacks left a number of casualties among the Israeli occupation forces.
Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas claimed responsibility for the two attacks. Maraqa carried out one of the attacks in a gas station near the Israeli settlement of Ghosh Etzion, and the other attack was carried out by Abu Afifa near the settlement of Karmei Tzur. Al-Qassam said that the attacks were the first attacks carried out by the brigades in Hebron, and vowed to carry out more attacks across the West Bank.
On Sunday, September 1, three Israeli police officers were shot dead at a checkpoint near the town of Tarqoumia, west of Hebron when a number of Palestinian resistance fighters opened fire on them. After the attack took place, the Israeli Occupation Forces raided the town of Idhna near to the attack site looking for the resistance fighters, and surrounded the house of Muhannad Mohammad Mahmoud Al-Aswad, believed to be one of the fighters that carried out the attack. Muhannad was assassinated by the IOF after they targeted his house with a barrage of bullets and an Energa anti-tank grenade, after which they confiscated his corpse.
A Hebron-based armed group called Khalil al-Rahman Brigade claimed responsibility for the attack carried out by Al-Aswad, which was also praised by Hamas as a “natural response” to the Israeli aggression in Gaza.
The three attacks that took place in Hebron are considered a critical development in terms of the situation in the West Bank, as they revealed that armed resistance attacks have spread to the south, which will make the IOF’s plan to exterminate resistance groups in the West Bank even more challenging. This development will also have its repercussions on Israel’s multi-front war in the region, after the Zionist state has engulfed itself in a war of attrition that has not achieved any of its goals.
On Monday, September 2, Al-Qassam Brigades warned that the Israeli captives in Gaza would return to Israel “in coffins” if the IOF’s pressure continued. Al-Qassam also said that it gave “new instructions” to its fighters in charge of guarding the captives in case Israeli forces approach them. Hamas’s warning came, as Israeli crowds took to the streets of Tel Aviv on September 1, engaging in civil disobedience, and a general strike, in protest of the government’s obstruction of a prisoners-for-captives deal.
