An Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza has killed a senior aid official and four members of his family on the same day that a gunman killed three Israeli security guards at the crossing between Jordan and the West Bank.
Gaza’s civil defence group, which fights fires and rescues people trapped in rubble, said its deputy director for northern Gaza, Mohammed Morsi, had been killed in an airstrike. The organisation said our members of his family also died in the bombing of Morsi’s house in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp, north-east of Gaza City.
On the same day, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said three private security guards at the Allenby Bridge crossing had been shot dead by a truck driver arriving in the West Bank from Jordan.
The driver “exited the truck and opened fire at Israeli security forces operating at the bridge”, a military statement said, adding that three Israeli civilians had been pronounced dead as a result of the attack.
Israel closed all three of its land border crossings with Jordan and the Israeli army was also reported to have cordoned off the West Bank city of Jericho, which is close to the Allenby Bridge crossing, in case other would-be attackers had already entered. Jordan’s interior ministry announced it was also launching an investigation into the shooting.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the gunman as “an abhorrent terrorist”.
“We are surrounded by a murderous ideology led by Iran’s axis of evil,” he said in a statement issued at the start of a cabinet meeting.
There has been a surge in violence in the West Bank, involving army raids on Palestinian towns and frequent and increasing attacks by Israeli settlers. In recent days there has also been a sharp rise in the number of attacks on Israeli settlers and security forces, including two car bombs and one attempted car bombing.
The increasing bloodshed in the West Bank comes as the Gaza war enters its twelfth month, with the estimated Palestinian death toll approaching 41,000. The conflict was triggered by a surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed.
Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank amid army raids and settler attacks. About 12 Israelis have died in fighting or attacks there over the same period, six of them in the past eight days.
The US, Egypt and Qatar have been trying to broker a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel for several months but negotiations are mired, mostly in a dispute over whether, or for how long, Israel can keep a residual force in a strategic corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt.