JERUSALEM, April 10 (Reuters) – Israeli forces killed two Palestinian women on Sunday after one ran towards soldiers and the other stabbed a soldier in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, security officials said Israeli.

As violence escalates after a series of deadly Arab attacks in Israel, a Palestinian man was killed by Israeli soldiers in what local residents said were clashes with stone throwers near the West Bank city of Bethlehem , announced the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The Israeli army said troops fired on a Palestinian throwing Molotov cocktails at an Israeli vehicle.

The bloodshed coincided with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when Israeli-Palestinian violence erupted in the past and, last May, escalated into an 11-day war between militants in Gaza and Israel.

In Bethlehem, no weapon was found on the body of a Palestinian woman who was shot and killed after ignoring soldiers’ calls and warning shots to stop running towards them, the IDF said, adding that she had opened an investigation.

Hours later, a Palestinian woman armed with a knife was shot dead after slightly wounding a paramilitary border guard in Hebron, outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which Muslims call the al-Ibrahimi mosque, security officials said Israeli.

Israeli forces are on high alert following attacks by three members of Israel’s Arab minority and two West Bank Palestinians that have killed 14 people in Israel since late March.

More than 20 Palestinians, many of them armed militants, have been killed by Israeli forces since January, while Palestinians have reported a rise in Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official, said that Israel’s expansion of settlements on occupied land that the Palestinians want for a state and the visits of far-right Israelis to the compound of the Al- Aqsa in Jerusalem led to an escalation.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the Arab attackers were “trying to destroy us” and were “driven by hatred of Jews and the State of Israel”.

Israeli forces staged raids in and around the West Bank city of Jenin, a militant stronghold, in an attempt to thwart what Bennett called “a new wave of terrorism”.

Reporting by Jeffrey Heller and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Alex Richardson

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