Hundreds of people attended the funeral of an 18-year-old Israeli soldier who was found dead on Thursday with stab wounds near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the killing as a terror attack and vowed the killers would be brought to justice.
The killing threatened to inflame tensions between Israelis and Palestinians just over a month before Israel’s parliamentary elections. In response to the incident, Mr Netanyahu’s nationalist allies called for further West Bank settlement construction and a heavy handed response. The soldier was identified as Dvir Sorek, from the West Bank settlement of Ofra, north of Jerusalem. He was a student at a yeshiva in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, south of Jerusalem. His body was found on the side of a road near the yeshiva.
Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said the soldier was neither armed nor in uniform when his body was found. He said the military was investigating the circumstances of his death and searching for suspects.
As part of the searches, a column of Israeli trucks entered the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Fajar, 1500m south of where the body was found. Soldiers blocked the road and searched homes.
Read the article in The Australian (AP).
[Editor: Why does this article refer to the death of an “Israeli soldier”. In fact the soldier was a student in a pre-military Jewish seminary programme and was neither armed nor in uniform when his body was discovered. This reportage therefore is in breach of this newspaper’s code of conduct clause 1.1 as the article’s title is quite frankly inaccurate and misleading. The editor of ‘The Australian’ should correct the wrongful misrepresentation of this story.]