Israeli police said officers shot and killed a Palestinian after he stabbed a police officer in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday.

Police said the officer was slightly injured in the attack and identified the Palestinian as a 19-year-old from the Gaza Strip. It was not immediately clear what he was doing in the West Bank.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Israeli military said Palestinians opened fire on a car in the West Bank, slightly wounding a number of Israeli civilians.

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Palestinians inspect the damage at a site in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip after an Israeli bombardment on Saturday (Jehad Alshrafi/AP)

Elsewhere in the territory, the military said forces opened fire on a “suspicious vehicle” that turned out to belong to an Israeli.

Two Israeli civilians were slightly injured as a result of the apparent mistaken fire, the military said.

The bloodshed is part of a wave of violence surging in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza.

More than 500 Palestinians have been killed in the territory during that time, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, most of them in fighting with Israeli forces.

Others were killed while throwing stones, or in protests against the military. Some of those killed were not involved in confrontations with Israeli forces.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis in the West Bank have also been on the increase since the war broke out.

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Destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel on Sunday (Tsafrir Abayov/AP)

Hamas’s October 7 attack sparked the war when militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and abducted about 250.

Since then, Israeli ground offensives and bombardments have killed more than 38,400 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. It does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count.

Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are crammed into squalid tent camps in central and southern Gaza. Israeli restrictions, fighting and the breakdown of law and order have limited humanitarian aid efforts, causing widespread hunger and sparking fears of famine.

Under American pressure, Israel has pledged to deliver large quantities of humanitarian aid into the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. But at the same time, the US and Israel have allowed tax-deductible donations to far-right groups that have blocked that aid from being delivered.