By Rami Amichay
SHILO SETTLEMENT, West Bank (Reuters) – Hundreds of mourners on Wednesday laid to rest an Israeli teenager shot dead a day earlier by Palestinian gunmen near a Jewish settlement, as months of tensions in the occupied West Bank again exploded into violence.
The family of Nachman Shmuel Mordoff described the 17-year-old as an energetic, smiling youth who loved animals and working the land. “God gave and God has taken away. Nachman, we love you,” his father Haim said.
At a roadside restaurant where Tuesday’s attack occurred, workers lit a memorial candle for the dead and placed it on a table draped with the Israeli flag. Four more people were wounded in the incident claimed by Islamist Hamas militants.
The death of Mordoff and three other Israelis in Tuesday’s attacks brought the number of Israelis and foreigners killed by Palestinians since the beginning of 2023 to at least 25, amid a wave of violence over the past 15 months.
The funerals of two of the other Israeli victims, Harel Masood and Elisha Antman, were held late on Tuesday.
“He was here at the farm, he was here two days ago and three days ago he danced at a wedding,” said Ariel Greenglick, from Kedar, a rural settlement in the West Bank, who attended Masood’s funeral.
“And someone asked him if he would come back again today and he said that it would be his last time, that he wouldn’t come. He didn’t know what he was saying.”
Around half a million Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, which is home to some 3 million Palestinians, in enclaves that most countries deem illegal. Israel disputes this, saying there are cultural, historical and religious ties to the land, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
In what appeared to be retaliation for the attack, groups of armed Jewish settlers went on a violent rampage in Palestinian towns in the West Bank, torching dozens of cars and buildings, residents and local officials said.
A statement from Achiya, the settlement outpost where Mordoff’s family lives, urged the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protect them.
“At this difficult time, we expect and demand the government take responsibility for our safety and act in order to defeat the enemy trying to hurt us every day, every hour,” it said.
As the bloodshed has escalated over the past year, the Israeli military has mounted regular sweeps in flashpoint cities like Jenin and Nablus, making hundreds of arrests and clashing frequently with militant fighters.
At least 174 Palestinians, most of them militants though several of them civilians, have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of the year.
U.S.-brokered peace talks aimed at establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – all taken by Israel in the 1967 war – broke down in 2014 and no revival is on the horizon.
(Reporting by Nir Elias, Rami Amichay, Maayan Lubell and Emily Rose; Editing by James Mackenzie and Mark Heinrich)
