Police: Israeli killed in West Bank attack

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Via Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/police-israeli-killed-west-bank-attack-064930413.html

JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinians wielding axes and iron bars killed an Israeli man outside his home in the West Bank, the Israeli police said Friday, the latest in a series of attacks on Israelis in the area.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the man was "brutally attacked with iron bars and axes" at about 2 a.m. after he went outside to investigate suspicious noises. "We strongly believe this is was a terror attack," Rosenfeld said.

His partner witnessed the assault from a window and she escaped from a back door of the house, Rosenfeld said.

The Israeli news website Ynet said the woman was lightly injured when she tripped on barbed wire while running away. According to the reports, the slain man was a reservist, a colonel.

The woman, identified as Monic Mor by Channel 10 TV, later spoke to the station from a hospital bed.

"Everybody knew him, he was a military man for many years," she said. The man, identified by the reports as Seraiah Ofer, had served as commander of the Gaza district and in elite combat units, she said.

The military stopped short of calling the assault a "terror attack," saying that an investigation was underway and troops were searching the area of the attack.

It was the latest violent attack in the West Bank.

Last week, a 9-year-old girl was wounded in a suspected Palestinian attack while playing outside her home in a West Bank settlement. An Israeli soldier was shot and killed last month by a sniper in the West Bank city of Hebron. And in a separate incident an Israeli soldier was lured to the West Bank and killed by a Palestinian who wanted to trade the body for his brother who is serving time in an Israeli jail for shooting and bomb attacks.

On Thursday, masked Jewish settlers torched three cars and defaced a mosque by spray-painting graffiti during an overnight attack in the Palestinian village of Burka in the West Bank.

The spike in violence adds to the mistrust between Israel and the Palestinians as the two sides hold negotiations that restarted this summer after nearly five years.

More at link.

Those peace talks sure are going swimmingly.