At least five Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in separate raids in the occupied West Bank early Wednesday, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.
Yousef Nimer, a witness, said Israeli forces began firing at people he was sitting with outside a hospital in the city of Jenin as they were finishing Suhur, the final meal before sunrise during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
"I told them, look, something is coming toward us. We ran away, then a sniper started to shoot at us. Some crawled and some ran away. The people who ran away got injured and those who crawled were saved," said Nimer, who was wounded in the incident and pointed to a hole he said had been made by a bullet in one of the hospital's walls.
In a separate incident Wednesday, Israeli police said an armed civilian guard shot and "neutralized" a suspect in an alleged stabbing attack at a military checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
The condition of the suspect, whom police identified as a 15-year-old Palestinian, was not immediately clear. Israel's ambulance service said two security personnel who sustained mild to moderate stab wounds had been taken to hospital.
Earlier Tuesday night, Israeli forces shot dead a 13-year-old Palestinian from a refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem and killed two others at a checkpoint, Israeli police said.
The police said the boy was shot after aiming fireworks at forces stationed in an observation post.
In the checkpoint incident, the police alleged that five people were seen igniting explosives and intending to hurl them at the road, prompting Israeli forces to open fire and arrest the suspects. It did not confirm any deaths and said there were no casualties among its ranks.
Israel has stepped up raids in the West Bank since it launched a war on Gaza in October. United Nations records show at least 358 people in the Palestinian territory have been killed since Oct. 7, a quarter of them children.
More than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion, which caused the death of around 1,160 people and abduction of around 250 hostages.
