An Israeli hiker was killed and another wounded in the West Bank on Friday in an attack apparently carried out by a Palestinian gunman, a hospital spokeswoman and security forces said.
Police and the military said the attack took place near the Jewish settlement of Dolev in the central West Bank and that the two men, both 25, were treated at the scene before being taken to a hospital near Tel Aviv.
“One of the wounded arrived with no vital signs and the medical team pronounced him dead. The other man is lightly wounded and is receiving treatment,” a spokeswoman for the Sheba Medical Centre hospital said.
A police spokesman said Israeli security forces were scouring the area for the gunman.
Shootings of settlers in the West Bank have tapered off in recent years as Palestinian attackers resorted to throwing rocks and petrol bombs at passing Israeli cars.
There has been a spate of attackers ramming cars into civilians waiting for public transport in Jerusalem in the past year and a number of people have been killed.
Tensions flared in Jerusalem last year, both before and after the Gaza war, but the city has been relatively calm in recent months.
The attack occurred on the first Friday of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan but prayers at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque which police said were attended by about 80,000 worshippers, passed without incident.
The Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — which have been Israeli territory since the 1967 Middle East war — and in Gaza, a strip of land on the Mediterranean coast that is separated from the West Bank.
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