BEKAOT CHECKPOINT, West Bank, Jan 8 (Hassan Titi/Reuters) - Israeli troops shot dead a
Palestinian brandishing a pipe bomb at a West Bank check point on Saturday, the
army said.
An army spokesman said the man leapt from a taxi and ran towards the
checkpoint holding the device, shouted in a threatening manner and refused calls
to stop before being shot.
As well as the pipe bomb, troops later found a second device on the man's
body, the spokesman added.
The incident occurred at the same checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus where on Sunday soldiers shot dead a Palestinian man holding a glass
bottle.
Violence in the occupied West Bank has largely tapered off in the past few
years as a result of tighter security measures and cooperation between Israel
and foreign-trained Palestinian police.
But tension has surged in the past week, coinciding with a deepening deadlock
in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
On Friday, Israeli soldiers killed a 65-year-old Palestinian in his bedroom
during a pre-dawn raid to seize a Hamas suspect who lived in the same building,
in what the army admitted was a mistake.
Last Friday, a Palestinian woman died following a protest against an Israeli
barrier built across the West Bank. A local medic said the woman died after
inhaling tear gas. (Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi and Ali Sawafta in
Ramallah and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem, Editing by Myra MacDonald)