Palestinian teenage girl shot near Yitzhar settlement in West Bank

A 15-year-old Palestinian girl was shot by Israeli soldiers near the Israeli settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus in the West Bank early on Wednesday morning.

Hours after the shooting Istibraq Ahmad Noor, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier was seriously wounded when she was reportedly stabbed in the neck at the Geva Binyamin settlement in the West Bank, local media reported.

The alleged Palestinian assailant of the attack was reportedly shot and a second person, who was identified in local media as 22-year-old Mutaz Atallah Qassem, was arrested at the scene.

Reports also emerged late Wednesday that four Israeli soldiers were wounded when a Palestinian driver allegedly rammed a car into a crowd in Gush Etzion in the West Bank. 

In the earlier attack on Wednesday, Noor, the Palestinian teenager, was shot in the hand after Israeli soldiers claimed she was carrying a knife. The soldiers said that Noor, who is from the Madama village south of Nablus, received medical attention on the site and is in stable condition.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors settlement activity in northern West Bank, said that Israeli forces claimed Noor was trying to sneak in to the settlement.

An Israeli army spokeswoman told Maan News Agency that the soldiers on the scene had told Noor repeatedly to stop moving but that she had “failed to comply” even after firing warning shots in the air.

The spokeswoman stated that the teen was “in possession of a knife and a firebomb”, and that she was caught 300 metres from the fence surrounding Yitzhar.

Those who live at the settlement are known for burning acres of land and carrying out attacks against the surrounding Palestinian town and villages, particularly during the olive harvest season.

On Tuesday night, two other Palestinian teenagers and cousins, 15-year-old Bashar Nidal al-Jabari and 17-year-old Hussam Jamil al-Jabari, were shot and killed after allegedly stabbing a soldier in Hebron’s Old City.

While some reports indicated that the incident occured at an army post, Haaretz reported that it occured in front of the House of Contention, also called the Al-Rajabi House, a location in Hebron which has been a source of dispute for nearly a decade over the ownership of the building. 

Last year, with the approval of the Israeli's defense minister, a group of settlers moved back in after they were evicted years earlier.

The exact location of the attack was not immediately clear. 

The Israeli army has described the recent wave of stabbing attacks carried out by Palestinians as “a continuous dynamic process” that could take many weeks for it to end.

“It’s contagious, but we can’t identify a directing hand,” said a source within the army.