Man shot dead near West Bank settlement, Israeli medics say

A man was shot dead at the entrance to a settlement in the occupied West Bank, Israeli medics said, in what the Israeli military described as an attack by "terrorists".

Friday's drive-by shooting takes to 15 the tally of those killed by Arab attackers in Israel and West Bank settlements in the past few weeks, Israeli authorities say, in what Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called "a new wave of terrorism."

Two gunmen fired at a guard inside the booth at the entrance to Ariel and fled the scene, the Israeli military said, adding that some roads in the area were closed off while soldiers searched for the suspects.

"We trust that the security forces will catch the killers," Ariel Mayor Eli Sheviro said.

In an apparently unrelated incident soon after the attack, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man in the northern West Bank village of Azzun, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. The details of the incident were not immediately clear.

A United Nations agency estimates Israeli forces have killed at least 40 Palestinians since February, when the deaths began to climb.

No Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the Ariel attack but Hamas, the Islamist group that rules blockaded Gaza, praised the incident and said it was partly a response to Israeli police raids on Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound.

The compound, Islam's third holiest site, sits atop a plateau in the old city. Known to Jews as Temple Mount, it is the holiest site in Judaism and the vestige of two ancient Jewish temples.

There were repeated confrontations at the site this month when Ramadan overlapped with the Jewish celebration of Passover, which brought more Muslim and Jewish visitors to the heavily policed compound.

Ariel is one of the largest settlements Israel has built in the West Bank, territory it captured in a 1967 war along with East Jerusalem and Gaza, which Palestinians want for a future state.