A deadly shooting at a border crossing highlights worsening unrest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

In the shadow of the war in Gaza, a parallel conflict in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has intensified as Arab attackers carry out more sophisticated assaults and the Israeli military increases the scope of its raids on Palestinian cities.

A shooting by a Jordanian citizen that killed three Israelis on Sunday at a heavily fortified West Bank border crossing came after three recent attempts by Palestinian militants, including from Hamas, to set off car bombs in the territory. Last month, Hamas and its ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, claimed an attempted suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in which the Israeli police said the assailant had come from the West Bank. Less than two weeks later, a drive-by shooting killed three Israeli police officers in the southern West Bank.

Taken together, the violence constitutes the most complex sequence of attacks relating to the volatile West Bank in years, according to analysts, who say it suggests that militant groups have developed new technical, logistical and organisational abilities despite Israeli efforts to contain their insurgency.

“If you compare what’s been happening in recent weeks to what was happening over the past decade, you can see a more organiwed effort to carry out attacks,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, a political analyst at the Horizon Centre, a research group based in Ramallah, in the West Bank.

New York Times News Service