Photo Credit: Shimi Levy

A teenage Arab terrorist was stopped from killing innocent people Wednesday afternoon as they were waiting for buses and other transportation pickups at the Gush Etzion junction.

The attacker, an older female Arab teen, drove her car directly at the bus stop.

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IDF soldiers permanently stationed at the site immediately opened fire to neutralize the threat, causing the attacker to lose control of the vehicle.

The car crashed into iron posts that were installed in front of the bus stop as a protective measure precisely for such an attack.

Magen David Adom emergency response medics treated a 28-year-old woman in advanced stages of pregnancy for shock as a result of the attack, and then transported her to a hospital in Jerusalem.

The terrorist, identified as Fatmah Taqatqa from the nearby Arab village of Beit Fajar, was critically injured due to the crash and gunfire. She was treated by IDF personnel at the scene and then evacuated to a hospital, MDA reported.</s>A female Palestinian attempted to ram a car into security forces at a tense junction in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday and was shot and wounded, Israel's military said.

No injuries were reported on the Israeli side following the incident at the Gush Etzion Junction south of Jerusalem. The Palestinian's condition was not yet clear, nor were details on her identity or age.

A wave of violence that broke out in October 2015 has killed 255 Palestinians, 40 Israelis, two Americans, one Jordanian, an Eritrean and a Sudanese national, according to an AFP count.

Most of the Palestinians who lost their lives were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to the Israeli authorities.

Others were killed during protests, in clashes or Israeli air raids on Gaza.

Violence has greatly subsided in recent months, despite sporadic attacks.</s>The teen remains in a critical condition.The incident took place at the Gush Etzion junction Wednesday in the occupied West Bank, near Bethlehem.According to an Israeli army spokesperson, Fatima Jibrin Taqatqa attempted to drive into a group of soldiers at a bus stop at a junction where civilians were also standing. No Israelis were injured, but a pregnant woman was taken to hospital after she experienced a panic attack, the Magen David Adom ambulance service said an Israeli army spokesperson told Maan News Agency.Video footage of the incident shows a car crossing lanes at speed, and driving towards a group of people at the opposite side of the road. The car then crashes into metal bollards in front of the bus stop.It's unclear at what stage the teenager was shot.Initial reports suggested Taqata, from Beit Fajjar, South of Bethlehem, had been killed, but it's now understood, Alaqsa Voice reports According to Palestinian media,, Amjad Taqatqa, at the main entrance.The Etzion Junction bus stop has been the scene of other car rammings and shootings.</s>Oct 26 A woman injured by a Palestinian man ramming his car into a Jerusalem light railway stop in what police called a terrorist attack, died of her injuries on Sunday, raising the death toll in the incident to two people, police said.

The fatality has put a spotlight on a spike in violence in the city at the heart of the Israeli, Palestinian dispute, where police have confronted stone-throwing protesters in Palestinian neighbourhoods on a daily basis in the past few weeks.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said a tourist from Ecuador, 22, had died of her injuries after a Palestinian driver rammed a car into the station on Wednesday. A three-month-old baby, who was a U.S. citizen, was also killed.

The driver, Abdel-Rahman Shaloudi, 21, was killed when police shot him after he got out of the car and tried to flee. Seven other people were injured in the incident.

Shaloudi's hometown, the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan next to the old walled city, has been a scene of confrontations since the incident, which his family has said was a traffic accident.

Police confronted dozens of protesters throwing stones and firebombs in Silwan again on Sunday ahead of a funeral planned for Shaloudi for which Israeli authorities have sought to limit attendance to try and reduce tensions.

Tensions have risen in Silwan since a group of Jewish settlers moved in there last month in the largest purchase of homes in the largely Palestinian-inhabited area by Jews since 1986.

Violence in East Jerusalem preceded the 50-day Gaza war that ended in August.

A Palestinian youth from Jerusalem's Shoafat area was torched to death in June, an attack for which three Jewish men have been charged in an alleged act of revenge for the slayings of three Israeli teens earlier that month.

Israel captured East Jerusalem along with Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War. It annexed the city shortly afterwards as part of its capital in a move never recognised internationally. Palestinians want the city to be capital of a state they seek in occupied territory. (Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan, editing by Rosalind Russell)</s>Israeli soldiers and police surrounded the home of Muataz Washaha, 24, and called on him to turn himself in. Although his relatives came out of the house, he refused to leave.

After several hours of standoff, the Israeli forces knocked down part of the building with a bulldozer and opened fire. Washaha's body was found shortly afterwards.

An Israeli military statement said that Washaha had been wanted for "suspected terror activity" and that the forces, which later found an assault rifle in the house, were operating under the premise that he was armed.

Two other suspects were arrested at the scene.

A Reuters witness said that no shots were heard from inside the home before the Israeli forces opened fire. Palestinian sources said Washaha was affiliated to a small leftist faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The Palestinian government in the West Bank condemned the killing. "The assassination of martyr Washaha represents a new violation of human rights. Occupation forces deliberately killed martyr Washaha," it said in a statement.

Amnesty International published a report on Thursday which said Israeli forces were using excessive violence in the West Bank, killing dozens of Palestinians over the past three years in what, they said, might constitute a war crime.

The Israeli army dismissed the allegations, saying security forces had seen a substantial increase in Palestinian violence and that Amnesty had revealed a "complete lack of understanding" about the difficulties soldiers faced.

Although their decades-old conflict has become a low-intensity confrontation, violence still flares regularly, with Palestinians accounting for the vast majority of casualties.

Israel and the Palestinians resumed direct peace talks in July after a three year break. The Palestinians seek an independent state in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, territories Israel captured in the 1967 war.</s>The Israeli military said the suspected Palestinian attack was near the Ma'ale Shomron Jewish settlement, north of the West Bank city of Nablus.

Video footage of the incident obtained by Reuters TV showed firefighters trying to douse the flames engulfing a vehicle on the side of a road after darkness fell.

The military did not say whether the victims of the attack were settlers, who are bitterly resented by many Palestinians.

Palestinians want to establish a state in East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

U.S.-brokered peace talks between the two sides broke down in April. A July-August war between Israel and Islamist Hamas, which controls Gaza, saw the deaths of more than 2,100 Palestinians and 67 Israelis.

On Wednesday Israeli troops shot and killed a member of Hamas' armed wing in the Gaza Strip, and an Israeli soldier was wounded. Recent months have seen an upsurge in violent confrontations in the West Bank and of attacks by Palestinians inside Israel.</s>Five village boys were arrested and accused of throwing stones at cars and causing the crash.

The incident has become emblematic for both sides of the decades-old conflict between neighbours who despise each other - and shows how young lives on both those sides can be reduced to ruins.

A three-year old Israeli girl in the car was paralysed and suffered brain damage. The jailed teens, all aged 16 at the time of the incident, face possible life sentences for attempted murder.

Israelis fed up with frequent such attacks have rallied around the case. The boys' families say they threw no stones and that the settlers convinced the mother to blame the crash on them out of spite.

"Shame on you! You have your children, now give me back mine," said 17-year-old suspect Tamer Souf's mother Watfa, speaking at the family home.

"She changed her story under pressure from the settlers," added his father Ayyad, who works in a plastic factory in the settlement next door. "It was just a normal accident, but they thought they could use it to incite against us."

The extreme length of the boys' trial process and severity of the charges has led Palestinians to accuse Israel of making an example of them and highlight for them the unfairness of detaining hundreds of minors a year to ensure settlers' safety.

Rights groups say security forces' treatment of Palestinian minor suspects in many cases constitutes torture and violates even the military laws to which Israel subjects them.

Defence for Children International-Palestine said in a report this month that over three-quarters of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank in 2013 "endured some form of physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation, a slight increase from 2012".

It said that in 96 percent of the 40 cases it documented last year, "children were questioned alone and rarely informed of their rights, particularly their right against self-incrimination".

Around 200 Palestinian children were in Israeli military detention at the end of each month in 2013, it said.

Adva Biton, the mother of little Adele who was stricken in the accident, declined to speak to Reuters.

"Our lives aren't really lives at all," she said in testimony to a military court in January, according to Israel's army.

"It's incredibly devastating to see a child without knowing what will become of her in the future. Her whole life has been destroyed because of the culture of rock throwing."

Well over half a million Jewish settlers live among 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that Israel captured along with the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war and which Palestinians envisage as part of an independent state.

Settlers and Palestinians share most West Bank roads and often live virtually next door, but rarely work side by side and virulently disagree over the future of the occupied territories.

Many Israelis see it as the Jewish Biblical heartland while Palestinians say they are interlopers on their rightful home.

Rows of razor wire and a soaring concrete watchtower mark the tension around the olive tree-lined road between Ariel and Hares.

Biton's car smashed into a truck stopped on the road that night, trapping the twisted wreck and its occupants beneath the undercarriage.

"I can just hear them screaming, and my youngest daughter who is sitting by my side with her head hanging, covered in blood. I scream and yell to the girls that (Adele) is covered in blood, and that they should scream 'Shema Yisrael' (a Jewish prayer said on a person's deathbed)," Biton testified.

The truck driver said he stopped because he heard a thud and thought he had a flat tire but soon concluded the sound was from stones hitting the vehicle, Israeli news outlets reported.

News of the incident quickly spread in Israeli media, and settlers gathered to pray and protest at the crash site.

At three in the morning that night, Israeli soldiers pounded on the door of 16-year-old Mohammed Suleiman's family home.

His mother Feryal says she refused to let them in, at which point they detonated a stun grenade and kicked the door down, entering the home with dogs and throwing Mohammed to the ground before arresting him.

"They took him to a hospital after that. At first, he was jailed in an underground cell for 24 days, not knowing if it was night or day. There have been 30 hearings since then," she said.

"He's just a boy. He's in the ninth grade and hasn't taken his college entrance exams. I don't even understand what's going on with the trial...this is oppression pure and simple."

Suleiman's lawyer told Reuters he expected the trial may last until the end of this year but insists the prosecution lacks evidence to substantiate the charges.

Israeli police did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the investigation and trial of the boys.

"They may appear inoffensive, but rocks threaten lives. Adele's story is only one of many stories of civilians injured in rock-throwing attacks," the Israeli army said of Biton case.

It says it recorded more than 700 rock-throwing incidents directed at Israeli civilian vehicles in the West Bank last year, leading to the injury of 116.

While the harm to Israelis and the jailing of Palestinian youths rile emotions on both sides, none of the 38 Palestinians and 6 Israelis killed last year died from stone-throwing.

For their part, settlers perpetrated 399 attacks resulting in Palestinian injury or property damage last year, according to the United Nations but there have been few convictions of those suspects. Police say they are mostly minors to whom courts show leniency.

They torch Palestinian cars and houses, beat residents and scrawl hateful graffiti on buildings and holy sites.

Israeli suspects in the West Bank are subject to civilian law, while their Palestinian neighbours face a 99 percent conviction rate in military courts.

The boys' case has deepened mistrust and hardening hearts on both sides, as hopes for disentangling the two peoples and building two states through peace talks fades.

"It's quite clear that they're using this case as an example to other children to control the population and to control communities, that they could face charges like this if they step out of line in any way," said Randa Wahbe of the prisoner's rights organisation Addameer.

David Ha'ivri, living in a nearby settlement, said 17-year- old Tamer Souf's father should lose his job at a Jewish-owned factory as a "convincing way to make parents keep better tabs on their kids and prevent them from throwing stones."

"It's disturbing, it's scary. You're concerned when your family or women are out driving on the road...the government and police have a responsibility to crack down on any sorts of attacks on civilians," he said.</s>Bahaa Badr, 13, was shot in the chest as Israeli forces entered Beit Liqya near the dividing line with Israel and were pelted with stones by local youths, the sources said.

It is unclear whether the boy took part in the confrontation, which the Israeli army described as an "illegal riot" in which residents threw molotov cocktails at their forces as they were exiting the village.

A military spokesperson said soldiers responded with live fire and the army would investigate the reports of the killing.

Israel has occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem since capturing them in the 1967 war. Palestinians want the territories, along with the Gaza Strip, for a future state.

Tensions in the occupied West Bank have risen since Israel's seven-week war in Gaza began in July and killed more than 2,000 Palestinians - mostly civilians - and more than 70 Israelis, almost all of them soldiers.

Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians mediated by the United States collapsed in April.
Israeli authorities shoot into a car that was on a ramming attack at a bus shelter at the Gush Etzion Junction in the West Bank where 13 Palestinians and 3 Israelis have been killed since October 2015. A 16-year-old Palestinian, Fatima Jibrin Taqatqa, had lost control of her car and the teenager now remains in critical condition.