RAMALLAH, Saturday, March 28, 2020 (WAFA) – Six new cases of coronavirus were confirmed in the West Bank today, according to government spokesman Ibrahim Milhem, raising total in Palestine to 97.

He told the daily briefing that three cases were confirmed in the Bethlehem area village of Irtas, including the 62-year-old husband of an infected woman, her 19-year-old and 17-year-old nephews, in addition to her sister in the nearby village of Beit Iskaria, a small village of 650 people surrounded by a number of illegal Israeli settlements in the bloc known as Gush Etzion, who caught the disease when her infected sister visited her.

Two more cases were in two Jerusalem area villages – one in Hizma of a 29-year-old man who got it from workers in Israel, and the second in Qobeiba, of a woman in her 20s, who got infected after socializing with an infected sister in the nearby village of Biddo, where more than one dozen cases were confirmed over the past two days and one death.

Milhem urged Palestinians to stay home and not to socialize with family members because most of the new cases were a result of social visits between families.

He said that 18 cases have so far recovered and the one death of the Biddo woman.

He said 291 tests conducted over the last 24 hours came out negative, except for the new six confirmed cases.

Of the total of 97, nine are in the Gaza Strip and the rest in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry also said yesterday that there are eight confirmed cases among the Palestinian community in Belgium, three and one death in Sweden as well as one death in New Jersey in the United States.

M.K.