JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Israeli forces killed six Palestinians late Wednesday and early Thursday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and clashes broke out between police and Palestinians on Friday after early Ramadan prayers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. The deaths came on the fifth day of a full-scale Israeli military campaign in the occupied West Bank and after the deadliest spate of terrorist attacks in Israel in years.
Video on social media showed Israeli forces using tear gas and stun grenades at the holy site to break up a crowd – some wearing masks – who were throwing rocks and furniture. According to the Associated Press, 117 people were injured, medics said.
An Israeli police official said in a radio interview that only a few of the estimated 12,000 worshipers were involved, including some who threw stones at Jews praying at the adjacent Western Wall. Some remained barricaded inside the mosque, he said.
The violence at the same holy site a year ago, which saw Israeli police enter the mosque to fight protesters, sparked a two-week airstrike in nearby Gaza. Officials are trying to stave off further escalation during a confluence of religious holidays that bring believers to Jerusalem: Ramadan, Passover and Easter.
Israel said it would bar Palestinians from entering the West Bank from Friday afternoon through Saturday. The army said it is sending additional forces to the West Bank, where it has increased actions against suspected militants.
Among the Palestinians killed in Thursday’s raids were two young men from the Jenin area, an impoverished hotbed of political and militant activity in the northern occupied territories.
The area has been the target of heightened Israeli detention raids and economic restrictions since April 7, when Raed Hazem, a 28-year-old accountant from Jenin refugee camp, fatally shot three people at a bar on Tel Aviv’s busy Dizengoff Street. Hazem was killed in a shootout with Israeli security forces after a nine-hour night manhunt.
The wave of violence comes as the Israeli government faces new elections after losing its fragile parliamentary majority and peace negotiations between Israel and the widely unpopular Palestinian leadership remain dead.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett vowed to “root out this terrorism” and urged Israeli civilians with gun licenses to carry guns in public.
The shooting in Tel Aviv was followed by three more attacks carried out by Palestinians from the West Bank and from Israel, where 13 people died. Since last month, Israel has doubled the number of battalions to reinforce soldiers in the West Bank and along Israel’s borders with Gaza and the West Bank.
Israeli forces have been scouring towns and villages in the West Bank looking for suspects or accomplices in connection with the recent Palestinian attacks. In Israel, security forces interrogated dozens of Palestinian citizens of Israel over suspected links to the Islamic State militant group after a Palestinian gunman convicted of attempting to join Islamic State fighters in Syria recently shot two people in northern Israel Hadera city killed march.
Days earlier, another Palestinian citizen of Israel, arrested in Turkey in 2015 for attempting to cross the Syrian border, stabbed three people and rammed another with his car.
Among the men killed in the Jenin area in the past 24 hours was the brother of Ayman Kamaji, one of the Palestinian prisoners who escaped from Gilboa prison in northern Israel last year and was later arrested following a nationwide manhunt became.
Four more Palestinians were killed in operations near the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem on Wednesday night, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Amin Khazem, an uncle of Raed Hazem, said Raed had told the family that he would break the fast of Ramadan in Jaffa. His family followed the initial news, unaware that Raed was the shooter. Around 6 a.m., Raed’s father began calling family members to confirm his son was dead. Israeli soldiers raided the family home the next day, but Raed’s parents and siblings had gone into hiding.
Khazem said he was shocked that his nephew was the shooter but not surprised that anger was simmering across the West Bank.
Because of the Israeli occupation, “there’s pressure and pressure and pressure and then suddenly an explosion,” he said. Almost all of those killed in Jenin in recent weeks were aged 30 or younger and lived only after the Oslo peace accords.
highway of hope and heartbreak
The faces of some of the dead can be seen on posters of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of the ruling Fatah party. Khazem said some of the dead were not part of the group, but that their inclusion was a way for the faction to save face at a time when there is deep dissatisfaction with the Palestinian political system in the West Bank.
“Everyone buys the guns and bullets themselves,” said a relative of Raed, who declined to give his name because he is wanted by the Israeli security forces. On the passenger seat of his car was an M-16 rifle with an Israeli Army insignia.
Earlier Thursday, violent clashes erupted in the West Bank city of Nablus after Palestinians fired on Israeli forces’ armored vehicles escorting a work team sent to repair Joseph’s tomb, a Jewish holy site in the city, the Palestinians last weekend had devastated Israel’s Foreign Ministry. The Israeli military announced it will enforce a general lockdown on the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 4 p.m. to midnight on Friday – when the Jewish holiday of Passover begins. People are only allowed to enter or leave the country in special humanitarian cases.
Israeli intelligence services have braced for a surge in violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which coincides with Passover and Easter for the first time in years.
After last week’s attack in Tel Aviv, police raised the alert level to the highest level since last May, when bloody Palestinian-Israeli clashes around and in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a historic flashpoint in Jerusalem, sparked an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The war was accompanied by deadly inter-communal street battles and bloody clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers across the West Bank.
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“We are being forgotten – only God knows what will come of it,” said Hussein Zakarna, a Jenin resident whose son Mohammad, 17, was killed by Israeli forces on Sunday.
The Israeli military said he was involved in the day’s violence. But Zakarna said he had banned his son from joining others in the demonstrations against Israeli troops just a day earlier. He said his son was on his way from working at a vegetable stand to break the Ramadan fast with the family.
“You’re dead both ways,” Zakarna said.
Rubin reported from Tel Aviv. Steve Hendrix contributed from Jerusalem.