An Israeli woman, on the way to a hospital to give birth, was shot and killed in the West Bank on Wednesday in an attack applauded by Hamas as a “heroic operation.”
The woman’s baby, a boy, survived after being delivered in an emergency cesarean section, Israeli health officials said, and remains in “serious but stable” condition. No Palestinian militant group took immediate responsibility for the attack, but a Hamas spokesman praised the shooting in a statement.
Israeli officials described it as an act of terrorism and said they had started a search for the killer.
The shooting came amid heightened violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where 500,000 Israelis live in settlements alongside about three million Palestinians. In recent months, Israeli forces have sharply escalated raids targeting militant groups in some Palestinian cities.
In the process, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, and tens of thousands have been displaced. The recent fighting has further exacerbated long-simmering tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank.
The slain woman, Tzeela Gez, 30, a therapist and mother of three other children, set out from her home in the Israeli settlement of Bruchin on Wednesday night, ready to deliver. As she and her husband drove to the hospital, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on their car, according to the Israeli military.
