After days of destructive incursions by soldiers backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers, residents who had earlier fled began returning to their homes in the camp, a bastion of Palestinian armed groups fighting against Israel, AFP journalists said.

On August 28, the army launched a military operation in several cities and towns of the northern West Bank, including Jenin.

It said in a statement on Friday that Israeli forces “have been conducting counterterrorism activity in the area of Jenin” without confirming a withdrawal.

“Israeli security forces are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation,” the statement said.

Over the course of the operation in Jenin, Israeli forces killed 14 militants, arrested 30 suspects, dismantled “approximately 30 explosives planted under roads,” and conducted four aerial strikes, the statement said.

One Israeli soldier was killed in Jenin, where most of the Palestinian fatalities have occurred.

Hamas, whose October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have said at least 14 of the dead were militants.

Aziz Taleb, a 48-year-old father of seven, returned to his family home of 20 years to find soldiers had raided it.

“Thank God (the children) left the day before. They went to stay with our neighbours here,” he said as he surveyed the damage, glass crunching under his feet.

‘We Didn’t Want to Leave’

Imra Itisadeh, a 60-year-old Jenin resident, returned to her house in the camp on Friday to find one of its walls partly collapsed and rubble on her car.

“At first, we didn’t want to leave. Later, (the army) pressured us, and we had to leave our homes. I left with my husband” on foot, she said, adding that she suffers from high blood pressure and heart trouble.

Two of Itisadeh’s children remained in the house with their families and soon ran low on nappies, milk, and water.

“It’s very difficult, and we are suffering greatly in the camp,” Itisadeh told AFP.

Many homes in the Jenin camp were damaged or destroyed by army bulldozers and pavement was stripped from the roads.

Residents used bulldozers of their own to begin clearing the rubble on Friday after Israeli armored vehicles left, AFP journalists reported.

The early trickle of returning residents soon turned into a flood, and soon children were playing in the streets.

Hundreds of camp residents attended funerals of those killed during the operation, carrying bodies in processions punctuated by chants and gunfire.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, and its forces regularly make incursions into Palestinian communities, but the latest raids, as well as hawkish comments by Israeli officials, signaled an escalation, residents said.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, said in a post on X on Friday that he had asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make the defeat of Hamas “and other terrorist organisations” in the West Bank one of the aims of the war in Gaza.

Since the war began on October 7, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 661 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the territory during the same period, according to Israeli officials.

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“Following exchanges of fire, the forces eliminated five terrorists who had hidden inside a mosque” in Tulkarem on Thursday morning, the military said.

On Wednesday, the military said it killed nine militants in simultaneous raids in several West Bank cities and refugee camps.

The Palestinian health ministry reported 12 deaths since the start of the operation.

Witnesses told AFP that Israeli forces had withdrawn from Al-Farra camp in Tubas where several Palestinians were killed on Wednesday.

An AFP photographer reported that clashes were still taking place in Jenin as he saw a drone flying overhead.

Israeli soldiers were also continuing to operate in Tulkarem, another AFP journalist reported.

Since Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel triggered war in Gaza, violence has flared in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and separated geographically from Gaza by Israeli territory.

Since the start of Gaza war, at least 637 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli troops or settlers, according to UN figures.

At least 19 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during army operations in the West Bank, according to Israeli official figures.

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Smoke billowed over the city’s refugee camp in the afternoon, with explosions and gunfire heard from inside, while soldiers in Israeli armored vehicles fired at masked youths in the city center, the correspondent said.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said Israeli forces had killed 11 people, including four children, and wounded 25 during the fighting, which began on Tuesday morning.

An AFP correspondent on Tuesday saw four bodies at Jenin’s Khalil Suleiman government hospital morgue.

Israel’s army said on Wednesday troops had “exchanged fire with armed men and killed a number of terrorists, including two terrorists who threw explosives at the forces.”

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa and medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported that surgeon Usaeed Jabareen, from the government hospital, was among those killed on Tuesday.

A schoolteacher and a student were also among the dead, Wafa reported, quoting hospital director Wissam Bakr.

The Israeli army said it had raided the house of Ahmed Barakat, who was suspected of involvement in an attack on an Israeli civilian last year.

Meir Tamari, 32, was killed in May 2023 at the entrance to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, medics and military officials said at the time.

Streets near the entrance to the Jenin camp were deserted on Wednesday afternoon, with drones buzzing overhead.

On the outskirts of the town, Israeli armored vehicles were parked near a roundabout while agricultural workers toiled on a farm across the road.

Bastion of Armed Groups

Palestinian militant group Hamas called the raid a “massacre” and deemed it “conclusive evidence of the criminal mentality that rules the occupying state and its ideological belief in killing our people.”

The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas condemned the raid, saying in a statement on Wafa that Israel was “killing innocent people, doctors, and destroying the infrastructure of Palestinian hospitals, cities and villages.”

Jenin has long been a stronghold of Palestinian militant groups, and the Israeli army routinely carries out raids into the city and adjacent camp.

The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has seen a surge in violence for more than a year, but especially so since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7.

At least 517 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers since the Gaza war broke out, according to Palestinian officials.

Attacks by Palestinians have killed at least 12 Israelis in the West Bank over the same period, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

The Gaza Strip has been gripped by more than seven months of war since Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,709 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

The post 11 Palestinians Killed in Two-Day Israeli Raid on West Bank appeared first on The Defense Post.

Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal had been responsible for a “number of terrorist attacks” over the past year, including one in annexed east Jerusalem, the army said.

He was “eliminated in a precision air strike,” it said in a statement that had a video link showing the strike on a vehicle.

An AFP correspondent saw a pile of debris and mangled remains of a car that was hit in the strike near the Balata camp in the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Camp resident Sajed Hazeem said he was woken up by a loud explosion.

Minutes after the blast an ambulance arrived at the scene but its access to the car was blocked by Israeli troops who arrived at the same time, Hazeem said.

“The army pulled out the bodies and after about half an hour it withdrew,” Hazeen told AFP, indicating that more than one individual had been killed in the strike.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said the body of an “unidentified martyr killed by the occupation (Israel) in a bombing of a vehicle” had been received by a hospital in Nablus.

The army said Abu Shalal was killed following intelligence “of his cell’s intentions of carrying out an imminent terrorist attack.”

The army did not offer details but said he was responsible for carrying out a shooting in the Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood of east Jerusalem in April last year in which two residents were wounded.

Abu Shalal was also responsible for a bomb attack on Israeli troops in October in which one soldier was wounded. The army did not specify where the soldiers were targeted.

“Under Abdullah’s leadership, the terrorist infrastructure in the Balata (refugee) camp in Nablus has received funding and guidance from Iranian sources,” the army claimed.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza on October 7, the West Bank has experienced a level of violence not seen since the second Palestinian uprising or intifada between 2000 and 2005.

Israeli army raids and attacks by settlers have killed around 350 people in the territory, according to an AFP tally based on sources from both sides.

Israel has occupied the West Bank, home to about three million Palestinians, since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is home to around 490,000 Israelis who live in settlements considered illegal under international law.

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Soldiers “neutralised” the driver at the scene near a military post south of the city of Hebron, the military said.

The Magen David Adom paramedic service said that it treated one person in moderate condition and three others who were lightly wounded.

There were no immediate reports concerning the driver’s condition.

The West Bank has been under military occupation since the 1967 Six-Day war, with violence in the Palestinian territory escalating since the outbreak of fighting between Israel and Gaza rulers Hamas nearly three months ago.

More than 520 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year by Israeli security forces and settlers, according to a health ministry toll, at least 314 of them since October 7.

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Several residents of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal, which lies 800 meters from the West Bank city of Qalqilya, have reported hearing “drilling and excavation noises,” with some even video recording it.

“I felt like there was an earthquake far off like the bed I was lying on was moving and sailing,” The Jerusalem Post quoted resident Baruch Ben Neria as saying. 

“At first, I thought it might be heavy trucks passing on the road,” he added, “but there weren’t any trucks in the middle of the night.”

Investigation Expected 

Local authorities have referred the matter to the Israeli Defense Forces and are expecting an investigation.

“Any strange sound we hear could sound to us like digging tunnels,” the outlet quoted the head of the town’s regional council, Yuval Arad, as saying. 

“On this issue, I believe the army will act, it is investing great efforts into it precisely because of the strategic threat of an infiltration that a fence won’t stop.”

“If they enter from here,” Arad added, “it is into the soft underbelly of Israel. A horror story like what we saw on October 7 would be just the beginning of what we would see here, too.”

Similar Concerns Elsewhere

Similar concerns were shared by the residents of Bat Hefer, a settlement less than 1 kilometer (.62 miles) from the West Bank city of Tulkarm.

Tests by a private company did not yield any evidence of tunnels, but further investigations are expected by a military engineering unit and a soil testing team from the Geophysical Institute, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Hamas Tunnel

Residents’ fear stems from the recent discovery of a 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) tunnel near the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel.

One end opens north of Gaza City and another 100 meters (328 feet) south of the border crossing.

It would have taken years to build the tunnel, costing “millions of dollars,” Reuters quoted chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari as saying.

It is up to 50 meters (164 feet) deep and up to 3 meters (10 feet) high and wide, enough for vehicles to drive through. 

Hagari, however, didn’t specify whether the tunnel was used in the October 7 attack, which saw the killing of over a thousand Israelis.

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The ministry said those who lost their lives included a 14-year-old boy and an 18-year-old. It said they had been killed “by bullets from the occupation (Israel) in the Al-Fara refugee camp” near Tubas.

The Palestinian Red Crescent also reported having treated six people wounded by gunfire, one of them critically.

“Clashes escalated with the (Israeli) forces who stormed the camp amid intense fire and… explosions,” said the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.

The Israeli army said in a statement that during a joint military and Shin Bet counterterrorism operation, “two wanted suspects were apprehended,” listing both as prominent “terrorists” who had previously been imprisoned.

“During exchanges of fire, a number of terrorists were killed,” it added. “Two M-16 rifles were found on the terrorists who were killed.”

Residents of the camp gathered for funeral processions on Friday morning, carrying the bodies of those killed in the raid through the streets.

The spot where one of them was shot had been turned into a makeshift memorial, with a pool of blood surrounded by stones and a Palestinian flag draped nearby.

Violence has flared in the territory since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

On Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said four Palestinians, two of them teenagers, were killed in multiple Israeli operations around the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Spike in Violence

The Palestinian Authority says Israeli fire and settler attacks in the West Bank have killed at least 263 Palestinians since the Israel-Hamas war began.

This exceeds the entire death toll of 235, most of them Palestinians, killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last year.

Last month, 14 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid in the city of Jenin, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry.

It was the highest West Bank death toll from a single raid since 2005, according to United Nations records.

Israel’s military said at the time that soldiers and other security forces had killed “several terrorists” with a drone strike and others in gunfights, seizing weapons and destroying a “tunnel shaft containing ready-to-use explosive devices.”

Israeli officials and military have regularly charged that the Jenin refugee camp in the city had turned into a “terrorist hub” where armed groups are among tens of thousands of residents.

According to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), since the war erupted Palestinian gunshot victims in the West Bank are now being shot more often in the head and torso rather than the limbs.

Without specifying who was responsible for the shootings, MSF’s international president Christos Christou said on Thursday there had been a “clear shift” in the injuries witnessed by MSF staff.

“When you see that shift in the trauma, you will see more and more dead people,” he said.

The Gaza war was triggered by Hamas gunmen’s unprecedented attack in southern Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw around 240 taken hostage, Israeli officials say.

In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and has waged war on Gaza that has killed nearly 17,200 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas authorities in the Palestinian territory.

The post Israeli Forces Kill 6 Palestinians in West Bank Raid: Ministry appeared first on The Defense Post.

Violence had already spiralled in the West Bank before the Gaza war, with the highest death toll in the Palestinian territory since at least 2005.

Many of the Palestinian deaths came in raids by Israeli troops but there has also been a rise in clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, with civilians and fighters killed on both sides.

Gaza’s latest and by far deadliest war broke out when Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, and taking 222 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.

The health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza said by Tuesday more than 6,500 people had been killed, also mostly civilians, as Israel has bombarded the territory.

Since October 7, tensions and bloodshed have surged in the West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem, with the Palestinian death toll reaching 102, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.

Over the same period, the Israeli military has reported one member of the security forces killed while taking part in a raid.

In the latest violence, four Palestinians were killed in Jenin and one in Qalqilya, both in the northern West Bank. One Palestinian was also killed in Qalandia, just north of Jerusalem.

The health ministry blamed Israeli “bullets and missiles.”

The Israeli military said it launched a drone strike on “terrorists” in the densely populated Jenin refugee camp, where it said “armed terrorists fired and hurled explosive devices at Israeli security forces”.

In Qalqilya, a military spokeswoman told AFP, soldiers fired on people who “hurled explosive devices, Molotov cocktails and rocks at the forces.”

Troops also opened fire in Qalandia, which the army said came in response to suspects who “threw burning tyres, blocks and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and shot at forces.”

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and withdrew from Gaza in 2005, subsequently imposing a crippling blockade on the coastal territory.

The post More Than 100 Palestinians Killed in West Bank Amid Gaza War appeared first on The Defense Post.

Twelve Palestinians, including militants and children, were killed in the two-day raid, Israel’s deadliest incursion in the occupied West Bank in years.

Israeli soldier David Yehuda Yizhak was shot dead by fellow troops “following an incident of mistaken identification,” the military said.

“A soldier that identified a suspicious figure making suspicious movements in one of the buildings shot towards it” during an exchange of fire with Palestinian militants, an army statement said.

Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi described the death as “difficult and unfortunate,” adding: “We will learn the necessary lessons.”

The Jenin raid involved hundreds of troops, drone strikes, and army bulldozers that tore up streets.

At least 48 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids on the city and its refugee camp so far this year.

Israeli incursions into Jenin, which is nominally under the security control of the Palestinian Authority, are routinely met with armed resistance.

The soldier shot dead is among 31 Israelis killed in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this year, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources on both sides.

At least 219 Palestinians have been killed over the same period, as well as one Ukrainian and an Italian.

They include, on the Palestinian side, combatants as well as civilians and, on the Israeli side, three members of the Arab minority.

The post Israel Says Friendly Fire Killed Soldier in West Bank Raid appeared first on The Defense Post.

“The operation is officially over and the soldiers have left the Jenin area,” a military spokeswoman told AFP.

The Israeli military launched the raid on the Jenin refugee camp early on Monday under the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s hard-right government.

The raid, Israel’s biggest military operation in years in the West Bank, employed hundreds of troops as well as drone strikes and army bulldozers that ripped up streets.

Israeli forces had started to withdraw from the Jenin area late Tuesday, a military spokesman told AFP.

Israel later launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip after intercepting five rockets fired at Israel from the blockaded Palestinian territory.

A Palestinian security source said the attack hit a military site of the militant group Hamas in northern Gaza but caused no injuries.

During the raid on the Jenin camp in the West Bank, the army said it had uncovered militant hideouts, arms depots, and an underground shaft used to store explosives.

The Israeli military said its forces had dismantled six explosives manufacturing facilities and three operational situation rooms in Jenin, and confiscated large quantities of weapons.

The Palestinian health ministry said the large-scale Israeli army assault on Jenin camp had killed 12 Palestinians.

The Israeli army said one soldier was killed by “live fire” late Tuesday.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis in settlements considered illegal under international law.

The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it seized in 1967 and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.

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