Palestinian pulls knife on troops in West Bank, is shot and killed

A Palestinian assailant attempted to stab Israeli guards at a West Bank junction Thursday morning and was shot and killed by police officers, police said.

No Israelis were hurt in the attempted stabbing attack at a bus stop at the Tapuah Junction in the northern West Bank.

Police spokesperson Luba Samri said the assailant, identified by Palestinian media as 19-year-old Muhammad Jihad Hussein Harb, from the Niqar neighborhood in the West Bank city of Qalqilya, alighted from a bus at the junction and began moving toward Border Police guards there.

After ignoring orders to stop, the man “continued to move toward them and at a certain point even pulled a knife out and attacked them,” Samri said in a statement.

He was shot and killed.

Security forces are regularly stationed at and near the junction, which has been a flashpoint of violence over the past year.

Photos from the scene of the attack showed the assailant lying lifeless on a sidewalk as a soldier stood watch nearby.

A Palestinian attacker who was shot dead as he attacked border policemen at the Tapuah Junction in the West Bank, December 8, 2016. (Police spokeperson)

Tapuah Junction, south of Nablus, has been the site of multiple stabbing and car-ramming attacks in the terror wave that began in the fall of 2015.

The rate of attacks has dropped precipitously in recent months.

Thursday marks the 29th anniversary of the start of the First Intifada, a several-year Palestinian uprising.

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