Palestinian shot dead after stabbing three settlers, killing one

A Palestinian entered the Israeli settlement of Adam in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, stabbed three Israelis, killing one of them, and was then fatally shot, the Israeli military said.

The attacker was shot by a settler, Israeli media reported.

Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, identified the assailant as 17-year-old Mohammed Tareq Youssef Abu Ayyoush. In a Facebook post from an account that purportedly belonged to him, Abu Ayyoush had allegedly called for a revolution against the Israeli occupation and decried the injustice inflected on Palestinians, who he said face "murder, displacement and dispossession of their land".  

Medics were treating three people, the Israeli ambulance service Magen David Adom said shortly after the incident. One of them was in a critical condition and later died of his wounds and another sustained serious injuries. The third person was lightly wounded.

In a previous statement, the army had said all three Israelis were "seriously" wounded.

Israel Radio said the assailant was shot by the security team of Adam settlement - also known as Geva Binyamin - which lies between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah. There was no immediate comment from Palestinian officials overnight.

Israeli forces raided the Palestinian village of Kobar, where Abu Ayyoush is from, overnight, where they detained at least three people, according to Wafa. 

Wafa added that the army closed off all of Kobar's entrances, effectively sealing it off, and that soldiers took measurements of the Abu Ayyoush family home - an indication that the Israeli army could carry out a punitive house demolition, a measure it regularly uses against the families of Palestinians killed while allegedly carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Meanwhile, local Palestinian news agency Maan reported that Israeli authorities had also revoked work permits for Abu Ayyoush's relatives - another commonly used measure which is denounced by Palestinians as amounting to collective punishment.

On Friday morning, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman took to social media to call for Israel to build hundreds of new homes in Adam in response to the attack.

Translation: The best answer to terrorism is the momentum of settlement in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], so I decided this morning to promote a plan to build 400 housing units in the settlement of Adam and approve it in planning institutions in the coming weeks.

It remained unclear as of Friday morning how concrete Lieberman's settlement expansion plan was so soon after the attack, although Israeli authorities have often used instances of violence to push forward construction in its settlements in annexed East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, despite such settlements being in violation of international law.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have surged in the past few months.

At least 152 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli fire since the beginning of Great March of Return demonstrations near the fence separating the enclave from Israel on 30 March.

On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed three Palestinians in Gaza.

The flare-up comes five days after a UN-brokered ceasefire helped stop an earlier surge in violence.

Earlier this week, Israeli forces killed 15-year-old Arkan Mizher during a night raid in the southern West Bank refugee camp of Dheisheh.