Hamas celebrates death of Israeli mother gunned down en route to deliver baby

Israeli soldiers at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Over the past year violence has increased in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Photo / Afif Amireh, The New York Times

An Israeli woman, on the way to a hospital to give birth, was shot and killed in the West Bank on Wednesday in an attack applauded by Hamas as a “heroic operation”.

The woman’s baby, a boy, survived after being delivered in an emergency caesarean section, Israeli health officials said, and remains in “serious but stable” condition. No Palestinian militant group took immediate responsibility for the attack, but a Hamas spokesperson praised the shooting in a statement.

Israeli officials described it as an act of terrorism and said they had started a search for the killer.

The shooting came amid heightened violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where 500,000 Israelis live in settlements alongside about 3 million Palestinians. In recent months, Israeli forces have sharply escalated raids targeting militant groups in some Palestinian cities.

In the process, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, and tens of thousands have been displaced. The recent fighting has further exacerbated long-simmering tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank.

The slain woman, Tzeela Gez, 30, a therapist and mother of three other children, set out from her home in the Israeli settlement of Bruchin on Wednesday night, ready to deliver. As she and her husband drove to the hospital, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on their car, according to the Israeli military.

Gez was fatally wounded. Her husband, Hananel, who was driving, was injured. Still conscious when paramedics arrived at the scene, Hananel Gez told them that his wife was about to give birth, according to Dr Asnat Walfisch, director of the women’s hospital at Beilinson Hospital in central Israel.

Tzeela Gez arrived in the operating room of Beilinson Hospital about half an hour after the shooting, Walfisch said, and less than 60 seconds later, doctors had sliced open her abdomen and removed the child.

“The emergency removal of the child improves the chances of survival for both patients – for the woman as well as for the child,” Walfisch said.

The child was in the neonatal intensive care unit at an affiliated paediatric hospital, the Schneider Children’s Medical Center.

Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that is fighting Israel in the Gaza Strip, praised Gez’s shooting as a “heroic operation” that “proves there will be no security for the Zionist pillager on our land”. The group did not say whether one of its fighters was responsible.

Israel occupied the West Bank in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, with Gaza and East Jerusalem, all territories the Palestinians seek for a future state.

Following Gez’s killing, the Israeli military said it had locked down Palestinian villages near the intersection where the attack took place.

After the attack, far-right Israeli politicians called for even more intense action against Palestinian militants in the West Bank. Bezalel Smotrich, a hard line minister and settler leader, issued a call to “flatten the nests of terror” in the West Bank.

Written by: Aaron Boxerman and Ephrat Livni

Photographs by: Afif Amireh

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