Israeli forces detained a young Palestinian woman in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron on Monday evening, after she allegedly disposed of a knife near a checkpoint.

Israeli police spokeswoman Luba al-Samri said in a statement that border police officers stationed at a military checkpoint near the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron’s Old City “noticed a young woman approaching them in a way that aroused suspicion.”

When the Israeli officers approached the woman, whom al-Samri identified as a resident of the village of Yatta in her twenties, she “threw away” a knife she was carrying.
Initial investigations reportedly revealed that the woman had been planning to carry out a stabbing attack against Israeli soldiers, al-Samri added.

Scores of Palestinians have been detained in the past two year for alleged possession of knives, with a concentration of detentions at military checkpoints around the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.
The Hebron area in particular grew as the epicenter of upheaval since October 2015, with Israeli authorities severely restricting the movement of Palestinians in parts of Hebron’s Old City as a “closed military zone” for several months.

Meanwhile, mistreatment of Palestinians in the Hebron area has been common since the city was divided in the 1990s after a US-born settler, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Palestinians inside the Ibrahimi Mosque.
The majority of the city was placed under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, while the Old City and surrounding areas were placed under Israeli military control in a sector known as H2 since the 1994 attack.