West Bank: Major Israeli offensive kills 9 Palestinians
A major Israeli offensive involving hundreds of troops and drone strikes has killed at least eight people in the city of Jenin in one of the biggest West Bank operations in 20 years.
The Palestinian health ministry confirmed at least eight people had been killed and more than 50 wounded in Jenin, while another man was killed in Ramallah overnight, shot in the head at a checkpoint.
Gunfire and explosions were heard throughout the day as fighting continued between Israeli troops and fighters from the Jenin Brigades, a unit made up of militant groups based in the city’s crowded refugee camp.
“What is going on in the refugee camp is real war,” said Palestinian ambulance driver Khaled Alahmad.
The camp has been at the heart of an escalation of violence across the West Bank that has triggered mounting alarm from Washington to the Arab world without so far opening the way to a resumption of political negotiations that have been stalled for almost a decade.
For more than a year, army raids in cities such as Jenin have become routine, while there have been a series of deadly attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and rampages by Jewish settler mobs against Palestinian villages.
The Israeli military said its forces struck a building that served as a command centre for fighters from the Jenin Brigades in what it described as an extensive counterterrorism effort aimed at destroying infrastructure and disrupting militants from using the refugee camp as a base.
As the operation proceeded, Israeli armoured bulldozers ploughed up roads in the camp, cutting city water supplies, the Jenin municipality said as residents described soldiers breaking through the walls to pass from house to house.
An Israeli military spokesman said the operation would last as long as needed and suggested forces could remain for an extended period. “It could take hours, but it could also take days. We are focused on our goals,” he said.
Until June 21, when it carried out a strike near Jenin, the Israeli military had not used drone strikes in the West Bank since 2006. But the growing scale of the violence and the pressure on ground forces meant such tactics may continue, a military spokesman said.
“We’re really stretched,” the spokesman told journalists. “It’s because of the scale. And again, from our perception, this will minimize friction,” he said, adding that the strikes were based on “precise intelligence”.
Safe haven mindset
Monday’s operation, involving a force described as “brigade-size” – suggesting around 1,000-2,000 troops – was intended to help “break the safe haven mindset of the camp, which has become a hornets nest,” the spokesman said.
Its apparent scale underlined the importance of the Jenin camp in violence that has further exposed the impotence of the Palestinian Authority to impose its writ over towns in the West Bank, where it holds nominal governance powers.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the operation “a new war crime against our defenceless people,” while UN Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland said he was talking with all parties to de-escalate and ensure humanitarian access.
Hundreds of fighters from militant groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah are based in the camp, which was set up 70 years ago to house refugees in the aftermath of the 1948 Palestine war. The fighters have an array of weapons and a growing arsenal of explosive devices.
Israel captured the West Bank, which the Palestinians see as the core of a future independent state, in the 1967 Middle East war. Following decades of conflict, peace talks that had been brokered by the United States have been frozen since 2014.
