The Israeli army carried out a raid on the city of Jenin on Monday, reflecting the explosive potential of the situation in the West Bank, amid mounting calls within Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and settler leadership for a major land operation in the northern occupied territory. Five Palestinians died, including a teenager, and 91 were injured in the attack. Among the Israeli soldiers and border police, another seven were injured. It is the first time since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005 that Israeli forces have opened fire in the West Bank using Apache helicopters. They did this to facilitate the evacuation of their troops amid what they called an “intense firefight” with local militants.
Two of the dead are Islamic Jihad fighters and a third is a Hamas operative. Two others were arrested. Raids occur almost daily in the West Bank, but it is not common for them to end in nine-hour battles. Nor is it that Israeli troops are being forced to abandon an armored vehicle – damaged by a booby trap in an ambush – and military jeeps because they were too exposed to fire from Palestinian armed groups.
Although the helicopters did not appear to fire directly at the militants, their deployment shows how Jenin and Nablus, the two largest cities in the north of the West Bank, have become bastions of armed youth, increasingly organized outside of traditional militias and systematically responding to raids with a mixture of gunfire, explosives and rocks. “We will continue to be aggressive. “We will use all means at our disposal,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tweeted. Islamic Jihad has asserted that the use of aerial bombardment – which also occurred occasionally during the Second Intifada (2000-2005) – will prompt its men to use “tools that surprise the enemy”.
Detonation of an explosive device by an Israeli military armored vehicle during Monday’s raid on the West Bank city of Jenin. JAAFAR ASHTIYEH (AFP)
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the operation in Jenin as a “dangerous escalation that will plunge the region into further bloodshed” and called on the international community to “intervene immediately”.
Monday’s invasion comes amid excitement over a major land operation in the north of the West Bank that has been called for for months by the most radical branch of the executive branch sworn in December, the most right-wing branch in its 75-year history. From Israel. Finance Minister, far-right Bezalel Smotrich, tweeted after the raid: “The time has come to replace pincer operations with a more comprehensive one to root out the nests of terrorism in northern Samaria.” [nombre oficial israelí de la zona] and restore deterrence and security.” In February, Nablus saw the deadliest raid on the West Bank since 2005, killing 11 Palestinians (four of them civilians) and injuring more than 100. A month earlier, Israeli forces killed another ten Palestinians in another attack, also in Jenin.
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