CAIRO/JERUSALEM, March 13 (Reuters) – Israeli strikes in Gaza killed four Palestinians, including two 17-year-olds, in two separate attacks, Palestinian medics said on Friday, with violence continuing in the West Bank and Gaza even as Israel expands its offensive across the region.
Israel has used lethal force in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank over the past 24 hours.
Israeli forces killed two in the West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday, according to Palestinian officials, while the death toll in Lebanon reached 773, its Health Ministry said on Friday.
After nearly two weeks of war, 2,000 people have been killed, most of them in Iran, with several million people displaced from their homes.
The Israeli military told Reuters it was not aware of the earlier airstrike reported in Gaza, which paramedics said killed three people, including two 17-year-old males.
Separately, one Palestinian was killed and several other people were wounded in Israeli tank shelling near a police checkpoint in western Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, medics said.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the latest attack.
The military said separately in a statement on Thursday that it had killed two individuals in the West Bank after they attempted to carry out a car-ramming attack on soldiers. It did not immediately respond to a request for evidence of the attempted ramming.
While Israeli attacks on Gaza declined at the beginning of the war with Iran, they have since begun to rise. Israel has killed 23 in Gaza since the U.S. and Israel jointly struck Iran on February 28.
While a ceasefire went into effect in Gaza in October, there have been regular outbreaks of violence since then.
Reuters has reported that U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza has been on hold since the start of the Iran war.
Violence has also persisted in the West Bank. Israeli settlers and military forces have killed at least eight Palestinians across the West Bank since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began.
Reuters has reported that there has been a spike in settler violence since then, as Israel has put much of the West Bank under lockdown.
(Reporting by Nidal Al Mughrabi and Pesha Magid, writing by Pesha Magid; Editing by Sharon Singleton, Rod Nickel)
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