Israeli raid kills Palestinian in Nablus as wife gives birth

Israeli gunfire in Nablus killed Nayef Firas Ziad Samaro, 26, and wounded four other Palestinians seriously, in a raid that struck a crowded urban area as schools were letting out and children were nearby. The Palestinian Red Crescent said five people were hit by gunfire, including a 12-year-old shot in the shoulder. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Samaro’s wife was in labor at Rafidia Hospital when she learned he had been killed, a detail that captures how quickly violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank now cuts through ordinary family life.

Israel’s military said its troops were responding to a confrontation in which people it described as terrorists threw rocks at soldiers. It said its forces fired and that several hits were identified. Palestinian medics and witnesses described a scene shaped less by a battlefield than by an overcrowded street, where civilian movement, school dismissals and a military operation collided in seconds.

The killing landed in a West Bank already sliding deeper into routine violence. The United Nations humanitarian office said two in every three Palestinian fatalities in the territory so far in 2026 occurred after the regional escalation of Feb. 28. In March alone, more than 200 settler attacks were recorded across more than 100 communities, and six Palestinians were killed by settlers that month, the second-highest monthly toll since 2005. OCHA said there were 925 movement obstacles across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as of April 23 and 24, the highest number recorded in the past 20 years.

The toll has been especially severe around Nablus and Jenin, where UN data has repeatedly identified heavy concentrations of killings. Since the start of 2023, 45 Palestinian communities have been fully displaced across the West Bank because of settler attacks and related access restrictions. OHCHR said more than 36,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced amid accelerating settlement expansion and rising violence in the 12 months ending Oct. 31, 2025, while OCHA and UNRWA said 999 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023. The Nablus raid was not an exception to that pattern. It was another example of how the violence has spread beyond Gaza, into homes, hospitals and the streets where civilians are still trying to live.