Suspected Palestinian Shooting Attack at West Bank Car Wash Kills 2 Israelis

Two Israelis were killed in a suspected Palestinian shooting attack on a car wash in a volatile stretch of the occupied West Bank on Saturday, the latest outburst of violence to rock the region.
The Israeli military said it was searching for suspects and setting up roadblocks near the town of Hawara, a flashpoint area in the northern West Bank, which has seen repeated attacks including one deadly shooting that triggered a rampage by Jewish West Bank settlers who torched Palestinian property, said The Associated Press.
Saturday's shooting attack came after Palestinian medics reported that a 19-year-old Palestinian died of wounds sustained in an Israeli military raid into the West Bank on Wednesday.
The latest attack is part of a relentless spiral of violence that has fueled the worst fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank in nearly two decades. Since spring last year, Israel has launched near-nightly raids in Palestinian towns in response to deadly Palestinian attacks.
Nearly 180 Palestinians have been killed since the start of this year and some 29 people have been killed by Palestinian attacks against Israelis during that time, according to a tally by The Associated Press. Israel claims most of the Palestinians killed were “militants”. But stone throwing youths protesting the incursions and those not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.
Israeli paramedics said that when they arrived at the Hawara car wash, two Israeli males, aged 60 and 29, were found unconscious with gunshot wounds. Israeli media reported the two were father and son and identified them as Shay Silas Nigreka and his Aviad Nir from the southern Israeli city of Ashdod.
Underscoring the severity of the attack, the country's military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, visited the scene.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent his condolences to the family and vowed that the military would track down the shooter.
“The security forces are working diligently to find the murderer and settle accounts, just as we have done with all the murderers so far,” Netanyahu said.
Videos circulating online showed Israeli soldiers walking across a pool of blood at the car wash to help move two bodies on stretchers to awaiting ambulances.
Several Israelis have been killed in Hawara in the current round of fighting. The death of two brothers, residents of a nearby settlement, last February set off a rampage by settlers through the town. Crowds of settlers torched dozens of cars and homes in some of the worst such violence in decades.
Similar settler mob violence has taken place elsewhere in the West Bank since. Israeli rights groups say settler violence has worsened and that radical settlers have become emboldened because Israel’s far-right government has settler leaders in key positions who have vowed to take an especially hard line against the Palestinians.
After the deadly February shooting in Hawara, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a firebrand settler supporter, called for Israel to “erase” the town from the map. He later walked back the remark after fierce criticism.
Palestinian militant groups praised the shooting attack, with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad congratulating the perpetrators. Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif Al-Qanou called the attack a “heroic shooting operation.” But the groups stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack.
Also on Saturday, 19-year-old Palestinian Mohammad Abu Asab died of a gunshot wound to the head suffered Wednesday during an Israeli military raid on the Balata refugee camp near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, the Palestinian Red Crescent said. At the time, the Israeli military had said that it raided Balata seeking to destroy an underground weapons factory when a gunfight erupted. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the Fatah party, claimed Abu Asab as a member.
Israel says the raids are meant to dismantle “militant” networks and thwart future attacks. Palestinians say the raids undermine their security forces, inspire more militancy and entrench Israeli control over lands they seek for a hoped-for future state.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Some 700,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, while Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.

Syrian security forces destroyed seized drugs Sunday including around 100 million pills of the amphetamine-like stimulant captagon -- whose production and trafficking flourished under ousted president Bashar al-Assad, an official told AFP.

“We destroyed large quantities of narcotic pills,” said official Badr Youssef, including “about 100 million captagon pills and 10 to 15 tons of hashish” as well as raw materials used to produce captagon.

He spoke from the Damascus headquarters of the defunct Fourth Division where the drugs were seized. The Fourth Division was controlled by Assad's brother, Maher.

Earlier, the official SANA news agency said: “the anti-narcotics department of the (interior) ministry is destroying narcotic substances seized at the headquarters of the Fourth Division.”

An AFP photographer saw security personnel in a Fourth Division warehouse load dozens of bags filled with pills and other drugs into trucks, before taking them to a field to be burned.

Over the past decade, the regime of Assad, ousted last month by opposition factions, has been accused of being the principal purveyor of Captagon, which flooded markets across the Middle East.

Revenues from Captagon sales sustained the old regime for much of the 13-year conflict. A 2022 AFP investigation found that Syria under Assad had become a narco state, with the $10-billion captagon industry dwarfing all other exports.

On Saturday, SANA reported that authorities had seized “a huge warehouse belonging to the former regime” in the coastal city of Latakia.

It said the factory “specialized in packing captagon pills into children's toys and furniture.”

On Sunday, an AFP photographer visited the warehouse near the port and saw security personnel dismantling children's bicycles that contained the small white pills.

Captagon pills had also been hidden inside objects such as doors, shisha water pipes and car parts, he reported.

Abu Rayyan, a security official in Latakia, said that “about 50 to 60 million captagon pills” had been seized that “belonged to the Fourth Division.”

“This is the largest such warehouse in the area,” he said.

Abu Rayyan said the drugs had been packed for export from Latakia “to neighboring countries,” and that they would be destroyed.

Suspected Palestinian Shooting Attack at West Bank Car Wash Kills 2 Israelis