Four Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in separate operations over the past 24 hours in the occupied West Bank, with the Israeli army announcing the city of Ramallah a closed military zone.

The closure was announced following a shooting attack near the illegal settlement of Ofra east of Ramallah. Two Israeli soldiers were killed by an unknown Palestinian. According to local news agencies, the Palestinian fled the scene in his car. 

In a statement, the Israeli army said it is carrying out searches near the areas of the roads entering and exiting Ramallah.

The Hamas movement, which governs the besieged Gaza Strip, saluted the shooting and in a statement said it proved “resistance” was still alive in the West Bank.

“The flame of resistance in the West Bank will remain alive until the Israeli occupation is defeated from the entirety of our land, and we regain our full rights,” Hamas said.

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to legalise thousands of Jewish settlement homes in the occupied West Bank that were built without Israeli permits.

He also vowed to expedite the demolition of the Palestinian attackers’ homes within 48 hours, increase  detentions of Hamas members already in Israeli prisons and beef up Israeli forces in the region.

“Our guiding principle is that whoever attacks us and whoever tries to attack us – will pay with his life,” he said. “Our enemies know this and we will find them.”

Overnight killings

The first of the killings came overnight on Wednesday when Israeli forces killed three Palestinians in separate operations over the span of six hours. They were suspects in alleged attacks on Israelis.

In the pre-dawn hours on Thursday, Israeli forces also shot dead a Palestinian accused of killing two settlers in the West Bank last October, following a two-month manhunt.

Ashraf Naalweh, 23, was killed during the arrest raid in Askar refugee camp in the northern West Bank city of Nablus Earlier, according to Palestinian security sources. The army has withheld his body.

In another overnight raid on a West Bank village, Israeli forces shot dead Salah Omar Barghouti, who was suspected to be behind a drive-by shooting on Sunday, in which seven Israeli settlers were wounded near the Ofra settlement. 

Wafa said the 29-year-old Barghouti was driving his cab when Israeli soldiers opened fire at his vehicle near Surda, north of Ramallah, and that undercover Israeli forces seized his body.

Army units raided the Barghouti residence in the village of Kobar, north of Ramallah, and arrested his father and brothers, Wafa reported.

In the Old City of occupied east Jerusalem, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man, Majd Muteir, after he injured two Israeli police officers in an alleged stabbing attack before dawn. One of the officers was moderately injured, the other lightly.

Israeli forces prevented Palestinians from entering the al-Aqsa Mosque compound for dawn prayers, and were heavily present in the streets of the Old City.

The fourth Palestinian was killed on Thursday afternoon, after an alleged car ramming attempt on a group of soldiers in Ramallah’s twin city of al-Bireh.

The man was identified as 60-year-old Hamdan Tawfiq al-Ardah.

‘Serious security situation’

Speaking from West Jerusalem, Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett said the events in the past 24 hours have been “very bloody – one that the occupied West Bank hasn’t seen for a good deal of time”.

“We have the pretty extraordinary circumstance of the entire city of Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority in Area A – where Palestinian administration is supposed to have at least nominal authority – has been sealed off as a closed military zone,” he added.

Regarding the alleged car ramming attack, Fawcett said that the official Palestine TV reported that “it might not have been a deliberate attack, [but] there might have been a loss of control instead.”

He added, “It’s certainly a very serious security situation that is still prevailing in the occupied West Bank.” 

A total of 56 Palestinians across the West Bank and Jerusalem were also arrested by the Israeli army early Thursday morning.

In the aftermath of the overnight killings, dozens of Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian vehicles with rocks on the busy Route 60 highway, south of Nablus. 

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, 69 Palestinians were injured in protests against the Israeli army raids into Ramallah and various other towns and villages in the West Bank.

Undercover Israeli forces posing as Palestinians, known as Mustaribeen, were seen by locals roaming the streets of Beiteen village, northwest of Ramallah. 

The closures in the West Bank has led to Fatah, the ruling party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, to announce their offices will be open for those who are unable to reach their homes.

London, England – Britain’s beleaguered Prime Minister Theresa May has defeated an attempted coup by Conservative MPs unhappy at her handling of Brexit but has been politically wounded and compelled to signal that she will step down before an election in 2022.

Her win on Wednesday evening by 200 votes to 117 in a secret ballot was announced by Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers, to the applause of loyalists packing committee Room 14 in the House of Commons.

The prime minister has come under heavy criticism since cancelling a parliamentary vote on Tuesday on her deal to exit the European Union – a move that prompted MPs opposed to her proposal to launch a plot to overthrow her – and the outcome of last night’s confidence motion is unlikely to affect the parliamentary arithmetic that prompted her to shelve the vote.

Maddy Thimont Jack, a researcher at the Institute for Government in London, said: “The fundamentals of Brexit haven’t changed – Theresa May still has to try and get her deal through parliament, she still has to have a meaningful vote, she still has to pass the legislation – so the scale of the challenges hasn’t changed.” 

Paul Webb, professor of politics at the University of Sussex, said the vote reflects only what is happening inside the Conservative parliamentary party at the moment.

“That’s a very febrile electorate and possibly a duplicitous one. But, on the face of it, Theresa May will still not have a majority for her Brexit deal and this is unlikely to make a lot of difference to that.”

The Conservative leader cannot now face another no-confidence vote among her own MPs for 12 months – giving her time to see through the infighting over Brexit.

She is talking to EU leaders on Thursday in an effort to make headway in securing concessions over the deeply unpopular Northern Ireland “backstop” that fuelled the revolt. 

But Wednesday’s vote is also unlikely to impact those talks – EU leaders have repeatedly insisted that they will not change their draft deal reached with London. 

Professor Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe academic think-tank on Brexit, said: “It does not affect their attitude towards concessions because for them this is a legal matter, not a political matter. For them this is just a matter of law, the backstop is the backstop, there’s no going round it.”

Interpreting the result

The result of Wednesday’s vote was a temporary relief for May, allowing her to paint 200 votes as a triumph because this exceeds the 199 she won in her original leadership ballot in 2016.

However, her victory was at the price of her premiership – a majority of Conservative MPs backed her only after she signalled she would step down before the 2022 election.

Moreover, May’s win will do little to heal divisions within the wider Conservative party: The European Research Group of hardline Brexiteers behind last night’s vote are also claiming victory. 

The vote also weakens the PM even further in the House of Commons, which is still smarting from her last-minute decision to push back the Brexit vote until January.  

Professor Menon said: “What we know in the structural sense is that we’re exactly back where we started – she has got a deal that no one likes that there aren’t the numbers to get through parliament.”

David Jeffery, a lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool who has studied the Conservative Party, said the vote of confidence in May could signal an acceptance among most of her MPs that her deal is the best they are going to get.

“A lot of the tweets in support of her yesterday were about ‘getting on with the job’ of Brexit – a lot of them want it over and done with so the next election scheduled in 2022 can be possibly on a different playing field, it can be in a post-Brexit environment and they can talk about other issues that they might be less divided on.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to discuss Brexit at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on December 11, 2018 [Yves Herman/Reuters]

May still remains vulnerable to a no-confidence vote within the House in the government itself, something the opposition Labour Party has been poised to launch.

Thimont Jack said: “The confidence vote illustrates what we already knew to be the case, but at the same time, because you can’t trigger another confidence vote for 12 months, so it does give May some breathing room. But of course, the political pressure doesn’t go away for her.”

The scale of disillusionment has prompted some to suggest that hardline Conservatives who rebelled against May might now be prepared to join the opposition to unseat her – the so-called “nuclear option”.

Webb said: “There might some elements of the European Research Group who are so disillusioned and angry that if Labour called a vote of no confidence they actually could either abstain on that or maybe even vote with the opposition.”

Questions are also being asked about May’s promise not to lead the Conservatives into an election in 2022. MPs have not forgiven her for an historic miscalculation in calling the 2017 general election in which the party lost seats and ended up relying on the small Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to retain power.

How infighting affects public confidence 

May’s sternest opponents within the ERG hinted that they did not entirely believe she will stick to her pledge to go before 2022.

Webb said: “If they were forced to go into an election now with her as a leader that puts her in an extremely difficult position to campaign – which would be very difficult for the Conservative Party. But it would also be very difficult to find anyone to replace her.”

By carefully avoiding offering a specific date on which she would resign, while powering ahead to deliver her own vision of a “softer Brexit”, May risks deepening Conservative divisions as the economic pain Brexit is likely to cause hits voters.

A golden rule of British politics is that voters do not vote for divided parties.

Jeffery believes, however, that despite their divisions, the Conservatives can still go into the next election with a chance of winning.

“They are very lucky in the fact that they are against an equally divided Labour Party. At the moment they are being saved by their own opponents.”

Menon pointed out that voters’ “memories tend to be quite short” and the things that stick are the things that affect them directly. 

“But this is different, this is just pantomime, and there is an element of ‘A plague on all your houses’. The divisions in the Labour Party are equally bitter, equally deep.”

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, which has previously threatened to table a no-confidence motion against May, said Wednesday’s vote changes nothing.

If the next general election is in 2022, Webb said, a lot can happen before then.

“But if it is an election any time soon, notwithstanding the doubts the electorate has about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, I think Labour would win it.”