Tel-AvivThree people were shot dead Sunday at the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, Israeli officials said.
The military said the gunman approached the Allenby Bridge crossing from the Jordanian side in a truck and opened fire on Israeli security forces, who killed the assailant in a shootout. It said all three people killed were Israeli civilians.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said the three men who died were in their 50s.
Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994 but is highly critical of its policies toward the Palestinians, did not comment. The Allenby crossing is used mainly by Israelis, Palestinians and international tourists.
The Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen a surge in violence since Hamas attacked from Gaza on October 7, sparking war in the area. Israel has launched almost daily military raids on dense Palestinian residential areas, and there has also been an increase in settler violence and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, an Israeli airstrike early Sunday killed five people, including two women, two children and a senior official with the Civil Defense, the response personnel operating under the Hamas-led government.
The Civil Defense said the attack targeted the home of its deputy director for northern Gaza, Mohammed Morsi, in the Jabaliya urban refugee camp.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment. The army says it tries to avoid harming civilians and only targets militants.
The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war broke out 11 months ago. Its tally makes no distinction between combatants and civilians. The war has caused massive destruction and displaced about 90 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, often multiple times.
Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. They kidnapped another 250 and are still holding about 100 of them, having released most of the rest in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel during a weeklong ceasefire last November. About a third of the remaining hostages in Gaza are believed to be dead.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have been trying for months to negotiate a ceasefire and the return of the hostages, but negotiations have repeatedly stalled.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank says at least 691 Palestinians have been killed there since the start of the war. Most appear to have been militants killed during Israeli military operations, but the figure also includes civilians and stone-throwing protesters.
Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — territories Palestinians claim for a future state — in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but maintained control of its airspace, coastline and most of its land crossings. Together with Egypt, it imposed a blockade on Gaza after Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.
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