Israeli troops stand guard at the scene of a ramming attack in a checkpoint near the city of Modi’in on November 2, 2022. Photo: Reuters TV via Reuters

An Israeli officer was seriously injured on Wednesday morning after being rammed by a Palestinian driver at a security checkpoint in the West Bank, the military said.

The driver then emerged from his vehicle “in order to attack the officer with an axe, who fired at the assailant and neutralized him,” according to the IDF.

Video footage of the incident captured by a security camera and circulated by Hebrew media showed the driver — identified in Palestinian reports as a 54-year-old resident of the West Bank town of Bayt Duqu, north of Jerusalem — emerging from a white van after striking the soldier. The driver is seen approaching the downed figure from across a poll and waving his arm in an apparent stabbing motion, before walking around the poll and being shot by the soldier.

The incident took place just outside the central Israeli city of Modi’in, in a checkpoint stationed along Route 443. The road connects the Tel Aviv area with Jerusalem, partly through the West Bank.

The officer sustained severe injuries and was stabilized before being evacuated to a hospital.

The night before the car ramming, the military lifted a general closure that was placed on the West Bank all day Tuesday, in a bid to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks being carried out as Israelis headed to the polls.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz sent well-wishes to the officer, saying the “conduct in the field deserves all praise.”

When speaking later in the day to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Gantz in part mentioned the IDF’s counter-terrorism operations in the West Bank, which intensified after an increase in attacks by Palestinian and Arab Israeli perpetrators led to dozens of Israeli casualties beginning last spring.

Just this Saturday, a 50-year-old Israeli man, Ronen Hanania, was murdered by a Palestinian gunman near Kiryat Arba in the West Bank. Hanania’s son Daniel was also wounded in the shooting, as were a medic and security guard who rushed to scene.

Earlier that week, a 55-year-old Israeli man was stabbed in the northeastern West Bank, days after a Haredi Israeli man in his 20s was stabbed in the back and seriously wounded in the Givat HaMivtar neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem.