Jordanian driver kills Israeli workers at border with West Bank

Three Israeli workers have been killed at a border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan when a Jordanian truck driver opened fire on them, in a fresh sign that the nearly year-old Gaza conflict is spreading violence across the region.

On the same day, an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza killed a senior aid official and two women and two children from his family.

The West Bank border shooting took place on Sunday at the Allenby Bridge crossing over the River Jordan, also known as the King Hussein Bridge.

The Israeli military said: “A terrorist approached the area of the Allenby Bridge from Jordan in a truck, exited the truck, and opened fire at the Israeli security forces operating at the bridge.

“The terrorist was eliminated by the security forces, three Israeli civilians were pronounced dead as a result of the attack.”

Jordan said it had opened an investigation into the triple shooting and that the border crossing had been closed. A spokesperson for the Jordanian foreign ministry Dr Sufyan Al-Qudah, said initial investigations suggested that the shooting was an individual act. The statement added that Jordan “rejected and condemned violence and targeting civilians for any reason”.

According to family members, the gunman was a 39-year-old truck driver who came from the influential Huwaitat tribe in southern Jordan.

Israeli reports said the shooting was carried out at close range in a commercial section of the border crossing, where trucks from Jordan and the Gulf go to unload for onward transport into the occupied West Bank and Israel. The border has been largely quiet since Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994.

In Gaza, the civil defence group, which fights fires and rescues people trapped in rubble, said its deputy director for northern end of the strip, Mohammed Morsi, had been killed in an airstrike. The organisation said four members of his family also died in the bombing of Morsi’s house in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp, north-east of Gaza City. There was no immediate comment from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Israel said it had closed all three of its land border crossings with Jordan and the Israeli army was also reported to have cordoned off the West Bank city of Jericho, which is close to the Allenby Bridge crossing, in case other would-be attackers had already entered.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the gunman as “an abhorrent terrorist”.

“We are surrounded by a murderous ideology led by Iran’s axis of evil,” he said in a statement issued at the start of a cabinet meeting.

There has been a surge in violence in the West Bank, involving army raids on Palestinian towns and frequent and increasing attacks by Israeli settlers. In recent days there has also been a sharp rise in the number of attacks on Israeli settlers and security forces, including two car bombs and one attempted car bombing.

The increasing bloodshed in the West Bank comes as the Gaza war enters its twelfth month, with the estimated Palestinian death toll approaching 41,000. The conflict was triggered by a surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed.

Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank amid army raids and settler attacks. About 12 Israelis have died in fighting or attacks there over the same period, six of them in the past eight days.

The US, Egypt and Qatar have been trying to broker a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel for several months but negotiations are mired, mostly in a dispute over whether, or for how long, Israel can keep a residual force in a strategic corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt.

• The headline, picture caption and text were amended on 9 September 2024. Initial information said that it was three security guards who had been killed. In fact it was three border crossing workers.