AN ISRAELI settler shot and killed a Palestinian villager in the northern West Bank, Palestinian health officials said today, during a violent weekend in the region.

The announcement came as eight-year-old Asher Menahem Paley died of injuries suffered on Friday in a car-ramming attack in Jerusalem.

A rocket was also fired from the Gaza Strip and was intercepted by Israeli aerial defences in southern Israel on Saturday night.

Video footage of the shooting in a farming village near Salfit in the West Bank shows Israelis racing down a hill from their illegal settlement on Saturday.

As Palestinians poured to the streets to see what was happening, one settler opened fire, killing a 27-year-old, according to Palestinian official Ghassan Douglas.

The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the villager who was killed as Methqal Rayan and said he was shot in the head.

Mr Douglas, who monitors Israeli settlements in the Nablus region said the settlers dispersed when the Israeli military arrived.

He said that the northern West Bank has seen an intense wave of settler violence in recent days.

On Friday, he said, just after the car-ramming attack in Jerusalem that killed three Israelis, settlers similarly streamed into the village and stole several sheep from a farmer.

Settlers attacked and wounded Palestinians who tried to defend the farmer, Mr Douglas said.

Israeli police opened an investigation into the shooting of the Palestinian, the military said.

It said Israeli security forces de-escalated the situation after the Palestinian was taken to the hospital.

The shooter has not been arrested.

In East Jerusalem, Asher Menahem died in Shaare Zedek hospital after a Palestinian man rammed a car into a bus stop in an Israeli settlement.

His six-year-old brother had died a day earlier in the incident, along with a man in his twenties.

Israel’s new hard-right government promised a harsh response to the attack.

Police arrested and interrogated the relatives of the suspected assailant, 32-year-old Hussein Qaraqa from the run-down East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Issawiya.

His uncle, 63-year-old Adnan Qaraqa in Bethlehem, said that his nephew had been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and that his mental problems started in 2008, when he was arrested for the first of several minor offences.

Mr Qaraqa said that Israeli interrogators had badly beaten his nephew in detention, from which he emerged “irrevocably changed.”

Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2022, making it the deadliest year in those territories since 2004, according to leading Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

Last year, 30 people were killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Deaths have risen in pace this year. So far, 45 Palestinians have been killed, according to a count by the Associated Press.

Palestinians have killed 10 people on the Israeli side during that time.