JERUSALEM — The prime minister of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Tuesday praised a shooting that killed an Israeli and wounded his wife and son as they drove through the West Bank the previous evening en route to a Passover meal.
Speaking in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh said the attack outside the city of Hebron “brought back life to the path of resistance” against Israel and warned of more attacks in the Palestinian territory.
Monday’s shooting came just before the start of the weeklong Jewish holiday of Passover, as families gather after sundown for a traditional meal called a Seder. No one claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hamas and Israel are bitter enemies. They have engaged in several rounds of fighting since the militant Islamic group seized power in Gaza in 2007 after ousting forces loyal to the Palestinian Fatah party, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, in fierce street battles. The two Palestinian groups have not reconciled despite several attempts and Hamas now rules Gaza while Abbas governs part of the West Bank.
“We tell the enemy and anyone who thinks he is able to tame the West Bank … the West Bank will be the future point of our struggle with the enemy,” Haniyeh said.
Israeli media said the wounded woman was told in hospital that her 40-year-old husband was killed. It said their wounded son is nine years old.
Israel’s public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, visited the wounded at a Jerusalem hospital.
“A harsh incident, I have been updated that everybody is making the efforts to capture the terrorists, the murderers. I assume that the security forces will get their hands on the murderers,” he said.
The attack could further complicate U.S. attempts to salvage the troubled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war from Jordan and Egypt.
Two decades of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have failed to settle the conflict, and the latest U.S. mediation attempt, launched last year by Secretary of State John Kerry, also seems on the verge of collapse.
Kerry has said he wants to see a deal, or at least the outlines of one, by the end of April. But the two sides remain locked in a dispute over the terms of extending talks, without having made any apparent progress on issues such as borders and security arrangements.
Attacks like Monday’s were common in the West Bank during Israeli-Palestinian fighting last decade, but the level of violence dropped significantly in recent years.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem “strongly condemned” the shooting, adding that “attacks against civilians within Israel’s borders are no different from attacks against settlers living in the West Bank.”
“The argument that there is justification for killing settlers as part of the struggle against Israeli occupation is both legally and morally groundless,” it said, adding that all civilians must be protected.
In 2002, at the height of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at a Passover Seder at a hotel, killing 30 people and wounding over 100.
