Israel arrests Palestinian suspect in West Bank killing

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s internal security agency said Thursday it detained a Palestinian suspected of killing an Israeli woman near a West Bank settlement earlier in the week.

The Shin Bet said a Palestinian suspect from the vicinity in the northern West Bank was apprehended as part of a joint operation with the Israel police and military.

Other details of the case remained under a court-issued gag order.

Esther Horgen, 52, a mother of six from the West Bank settlement of Tal Menashe, was found dead in a nearby forest on Monday after she had gone missing a day earlier.

Israeli officials have called her death a murder, and settler leaders have charged that she was killed in a Palestinian attack. Israel’s figurehead president, Reuven Rivlin, visited the family Thursday and offered his condolences.

Nearly 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war. The Palestinians want the West Bank to be part of their future state and view the settlements as illegal and an obstacle to peace, a position shared by most of the international community.