Israeli troops launched a fourth day of operations around Jenin after an assailant from the district shot and killed three people in a Tel Aviv bar last week in an attack that stunned the country.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett overnight visited the reopened bar that was the scene of Thursday’s bloody carnage, which sparked an all-night manhunt before the shooter was killed in a firefight.

“We will not let our enemy stop our lives,” Bennett vowed.

“We will continue to live our lives and at the same time we will fight where they are located, in their bases, at their source —- and, please God, we will win.”

Jenin residents told AFP Tuesday that new fighting had broken out after multiple gun battles in recent days.

Palestinian official news agency Wafa said “clashes erupted” between young Palestinian men and Israeli soldiers “who fired live bullets, stun grenades and tear gas at them”.

Israeli forces had arrested four people from Jenin and the nearby village of al-Yamoun, it added.

The Israeli army did not immediately respond to AFP questions on the operation.

Wave of violence

The latest violent incident in Israel came Tuesday in the Mediterranean port city of Ashkelon, where police said an officer was checking a person who aroused his suspicion when “the attacker pulled out a knife and attacked the officer”.

The officer “responded quickly, fired and neutralised the suspect, whose death was declared on site,” police said.

The officer was hospitalised with light wounds from the attack using a kitchen knife.

The assailant was in his 40s and from the flashpoint city of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, police said.

Ashkelon said it deployed extra police on motorcycles to patrol schools and commercial areas.

Israeli troops and police have stepped up operations amid a rising tide of violence over the past three weeks in which four shooting, stabbing and car-ramming attacks have left 14 people dead.

In another major attack, in Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv, a Palestinian assailant from the Jenin area killed five people before police gunned him down.

Over the same period, Israeli forces have killed 15 Palestinians, including assailants, according to an AFP tally.

On Sunday, Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian woman who stabbed a policeman in the centre of Hebron, a powder keg where around 1,000 Jewish settlers live under heavy military protection among 200,000 Palestinians.

The same day, the army shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian woman who they said failed to heed warning shots near the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

The rise in violence comes during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and days before the Jewish festival of Passover and Christian Easter.

© 2022 AFP