Israeli motorist lightly hurt in terror shooting near flashpoint Huwara — IDF

An Israeli motorist was lightly hurt in a shooting attack Tuesday night near the northern West Bank town of Huwara, the military and medics said.

The victim said he came under fire while driving near the Palestinian town, north of the Tapuach Junction. He continued driving until reaching Israeli medics and military forces nearby, the Israel Defense Forces said.

According to local authorities, the victim’s car was hit with 12 gunshots, shattering its windows. The IDF said troops located a number of shell casings in the area and were searching for the suspected terrorists.

The victim suffered a light injury to his shoulder from flying glass shards, the Magen David Adom ambulance service said. He was treated at the scene.

The shooting attack came a day after two Israeli soldiers were wounded, moderately and lightly, in an alleged car-ramming attack in Huwara. The Palestinian driver initially fled the scene, before being caught by troops close to an entrance to the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Huwara has long been a flashpoint in the West Bank, thanks to a main thoroughfare running through the town also being used regularly by Israelis to travel to and from settlements. There are plans to build a bypass road for settlers to avoid having to travel through the town, but work has dragged on for years.

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There have been several shooting attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers in the town in recent months, including the killing of two brothers in February.

In separate attacks in Huwara last month, a Palestinian woman stabbed a soldier before being shot dead, and a Palestinian driver rammed into a soldier before turning himself in two days later

There have also been a handful of instances of settler violence targeting the Palestinian residents of Huwara, including a deadly rampage that unfolded hours after the February attack in which the two Israeli brothers were shot dead. A 37-year-old Palestinian man was killed, some 300 were wounded — four seriously — and dozens of buildings and vehicles were torched.

Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians have been high for the past year, with the Israeli military conducting near-nightly raids in the West Bank, in the wake of a series of deadly Palestinian terror attacks.

Since the beginning of the year, Palestinian attacks in Israel and the West Bank have killed 20 people and left several more seriously hurt. At least 115 West Bank Palestinians have been killed during that span, most of them while carrying out attacks or during clashes with security forces, but some were uninvolved civilians and others were killed under circumstances that are being investigated.