Israeli forces kill Palestinian militant in West Bank clash
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Israeli forces killed a Palestinian militant during clashes that followed a military arrest raid in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, the Islamic Jihad armed group said.
The Israeli military said that suspects threw explosives at soldiers in the confrontations near the flashpoint city of Jenin and that the troops responded with live fire.
The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed one fatality. Dozens of mourners marched at the militant's funeral, some of them masked gunmen who fired rifles into the air.
"We will meet our enemy only with bullets and resistance," Islamic Jihad said.
In the Palestinian city Hebron, Israeli security forces arrested two Palestinians who they said had carried out a drive-by shooting that killed an Israeli woman on Monday while a search continued for another gunman who killed two Israelis in the village Huwara further north on Saturday.
The military said it arrested 32 Palestinian suspects overnight in the West Bank, where violence has worsened over the past 15 months with frequent Israeli raids, Palestinian street attacks and assaults on villages by Jewish settlers.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security cabinet for consultations on Tuesday.
A statement released by his office at the end of the meeting said the cabinet took a number of decisions "to hit terrorists and their messengers", without elaborating.
While the security cabinet was in session, settler leaders protested outside his office demanding a tougher crackdown against Palestinian militants.
Netanyahu's far-right police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a member of the security cabinet, said in a statement that Israel was facing a "wave of terrorism that must be broken with a lot of work and brave decisions".
Prospects of reviving U.S.-brokered peace talks that aimed to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, remain dim almost a decade after their collapse.
Israel captured the West Bank in a 1967 war and has since built dozens of settlements there that are considered illegal by most countries, a view Israel disputes, with its military in control of more than half the territory.
The Palestinians have limited self-rule in the West Bank and remain split between a Western-backed administration and armed Hamas Islamists who reject coexistence with Israel, while many in Israel's government reject Palestinian statehood.
(Reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Editing by Edmund Klamann, Ed Osmond and Bernadette Baum)