Rare death of UN worker as Israel pursues West Bank operation

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said Friday one of its employees was killed during an Israeli operation in the occupied West Bank, where raids have escalated since last month.

The United Nations agency, UNRWA, said the employee was its first to be killed in the Palestinian territory in more than a decade.

But he is among dozens of Palestinians killed during the large-scale Israeli operation which began days ago and is ongoing, with several more Palestinians dead since Wednesday.

UNRWA identified the employee as Sufyan Jaber Abed Jawwad, who worked as a sanitation laborer. It said he was “shot and killed on the roof of his home by a sniper” in Faraa refugee camp.

His death is in addition to those of six other UNRWA staffers the UN said were killed in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday during a strike on a school-turned-shelter. It was the highest single incident toll for the agency, UNRWA said.

Mourners on Friday carried Jawwad’s body through the streets of Faraa, with his blue UN vest resting atop the Palestinian flag that covered him.

In nearby Tubas, funerals also took place for other Palestinians, who were killed by an air strike.

A military statement on Friday said Israeli forces had “conducted a 48-hour counter-terrorism operation” in the areas of Tubas, Tamun and Faraa — northeast of Nablus — killing “five armed terrorists” in an air strike.

It added that a sixth militant was also killed.

Violence in the West Bank had already soared alongside the nearly 12-month-old war in Gaza but in late August Israel began its large-scale raids.

Major Israeli operations in the West Bank are sometimes occurring “at a scale not witnessed in the last two decades,” the United Nations human rights chief said this week.

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the military withdrew from Tubas on Thursday evening, allowing the funerals there to go ahead, after the air strike which the Palestinian Red Crescent said killed them on Wednesday.

“I woke up in the morning to the sound of an explosion,” Ahmed Sawafta, father of one of the dead men, said.

The fifth person killed was buried on Friday in Tamun, also in the northern West Bank.

Osaid Kharaz, who identified himself as a Hamas activist, told AFP at the funeral in Tubas that Israel “is attempting to impose a new reality and undermine the popular support for the resistance (to Israeli occupation) in the West Bank.”