- Israeli police said on Wednesday they found the body of a Palestinian man suspected of killing an 84-year-old Israeli woman after a night-time manhunt.
According to authorities, the man’s body turned up in Tel Aviv, hours after allegedly beating and killing the woman in Holon, a southern suburb of the city.
Police had said earlier in the day that they were looking for Musa Sarsour, 28, from the West Bank city of Qalqilya. The death was being treated as a nationalistically motivated attack, he added.
The woman was found unconscious on the side of a road and Israeli media reported that security camera footage that captured the attack showed how she was assaulted from behind with a blunt object.
Israel’s interim prime minister, Yair Lapid, who was at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, called the assassination a “stunning attack at the hands of a despicable and cowardly terrorist.”
The incident comes as Israel continues its daily detention raids in the occupied West Bank, which were sparked by a series of incidents that left 19 Israelis dead over the spring.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested since then and some 90 have died, making this year the deadliest for Palestinians since 2016. Many of those killed were insurgents, according to Israel, or local youths who were killed while throwing stones and incendiary bombs on Israeli troops.
Israel maintains that the searches seek to dismantle insurgent networks that threaten its citizens and that it makes every effort to avoid civilian casualties. But the Palestinians say such operations seek to maintain their military mandate over the territories they want for their future state, a dream that seems further away than ever in the absence of serious peace negotiations in more than a decade.
The raids have weakened the Palestinian Authority government, which administers parts of the West Bank and maintains security ties with Israel, something Palestinians say entrenches Israel’s military occupation.
This hostility against the Authority became visible on Tuesday, when Palestinians from the West Bank city of Nablus clashed with Palestinian security forces after the arrest of insurgents.
Israel’s 55-year military occupation of the West Bank shows no sign of ending anytime soon. The Palestinians claim the entire West Bank territory, where some 500,000 Jewish settlers live, as the heart of a future independent state.