A 16-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli fire during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday, local authorities said.
The Palestinian Health Ministry announced, "Amer Abu Zeitoun, 16, was killed by a bullet in the head fired by the occupation (Israeli) soldiers during the aggression on Nablus at dawn today."
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said Abu Zeitoun was shot during clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers during an army arrest raid. It was not immediately clear if Abu Zeitoun was taking part in the confrontations.
Israel's military, however, claimed that "armed suspects fired toward the soldiers, who responded with live fire" during an operation to arrest two people.
The Lions' Den, a local Palestinian armed group, said in a statement its members had been involved in the overnight clashes in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus.
It was the latest bloodshed in the region that has seen Israeli-Palestinian tensions surge for almost a year.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank and east Jerusalem last year, according to Jerusalem-based rights group B’Tselem, making 2022 the deadliest since 2004, when 197 Palestinians were killed.
The United Nations, meanwhile, offered similar figures in December, while other sources have reported over 220 dead.
Zeitoun is the fourth Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the start of the year.
On Tuesday, 15-year-old Adam Essam Shaker Ayyad was killed in Bethlehem as Israel said its forces fired on people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails.
The inauguration last week of the most right-wing government in Israel's history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has sparked fears of a military escalation in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War.
Two of Netanyahu's extreme-right coalition partners, who have a history of inflammatory remarks about Palestinians, have taken charge of critical powers regarding the West Bank.
Bezalel Smotrich holds the portfolio for Israeli settlement policy in the territory, while Itamar Ben-Gvir serves as national security minister with powers over the border police force which operates there.
They took office at the end of a year which saw more than 26 Israelis and 230 Palestinians killed across Israel and the Palestinian territories, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally.
