Palestinian shot dead after injuring Israeli soldiers in car-ramming: military

BEIT UMMAR, West Bank (Reuters) - A Palestinian was shot dead while carrying out a car-ramming attack on Monday that injured three Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military said. The military said one of the soldiers sustained moderate injuries and the other two were slightly hurt when the Palestinian crashed his vehicle into them along a West Bank road north of the city of Hebron. Another soldier then shot and killed the assailant, the military said. Palestinians, many of them individuals without known associations with militant groups, carried out a wave of car-ramming attacks in the West Bank in late 2015 and in 2016, but the frequency of such incidents has since decreased. There was no claim of responsibility for Monday's incident, which drew praise from the Hamas militant group as "a response to crimes carried out by the occupation", a term it uses to refer to Israel. Israel captured the West Bank in a 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians seek to establish a state there and in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014. (Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by Alison Williams)