Two Soldiers Dead in Hebron Junction Shooting, Israeli Forces Seal Off City

Ordinary movement in Hebron changed on Friday after two Israeli soldiers were killed at a junction near the city. Israeli forces cordoned off the area, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered residents evacuated from the neighborhood where the attackers lived so troops could search homes for weapons. Hebron has more than 200,000 inhabitants.

The Israeli military said two Palestinian men opened fire at the junction and were killed by forces at the scene. The army named the dead soldiers as Staff Sergeant Ron Yonatan Roytman and Sergeant Yuval Shai Svilem. Three other soldiers were lightly wounded. The attackers carried an M16 rifle and a handgun, and a large quantity of weapons and ammunition was found in their vehicle, which the military said pointed to plans for a major attack on civilians.

The timeline leading to Friday's orders runs through a week of Israeli operations in the West Bank. The military said it arrested around 70 wanted Palestinians in West Bank operations over that period. Brad Lander, a New York Democratic candidate for Congress, was briefly detained by Israeli forces this week while helping Palestinian farmers during the annual olive harvest. The shooting at the Hebron junction followed a recent surge in violence in the West Bank.

Netanyahu, who described the gunmen as "Hamas terrorists," convened senior security chiefs on Friday and Likud, his party, said all campaign events for the rest of the day were canceled. Hamas called the attack heroic and a legitimate response to what it described as "ongoing crimes and brutal attacks against our people, land, and holy sites." The group did not claim responsibility and urged armed Palestinians in the West Bank to attack Israeli soldiers and civilians in the occupied territory.

The Israeli military said it had begun operations in the Hebron area and that soldiers were inside the homes of the attackers and other suspects. Netanyahu said troops would go house-to-house in the neighborhoods from which the gunmen emerged to dismantle what he called terror infrastructure, and that Israel was prepared for an extensive operation in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli name for the West Bank. "Our first step will be to demolish this site and completely transform it," he said.

Netanyahu has made national security a central theme of his bid for another term in Tuesday's election, and he characterized the shooting as an attempt to influence the vote, recalling a warning he issued a few weeks earlier that Israel's enemies were preparing attacks to sway the election.