JENIN, West Bank (AP) — Armed Israeli forces disguised as women and medical workers stormed a hospital in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday and killed three Palestinian militants in a dramatic raid that highlighted the spillover of deadly violence into the territory during the Gaza war .
The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces opened fire on the rooms of the Ibn Sina Hospital in the city of Jenin. The ministry condemned the raid and called on the international community to put pressure on the Israeli military to stop these operations in hospitals. A hospital spokesman said there was no exchange of gunfire, suggesting it was a targeted killing.
The military said the militants were using the hospital as a hideout. It was alleged that one of those targeted in the raid had handed over weapons and ammunition to others for a planned attack allegedly inspired by the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7. The military provided no evidence to support this claim.
Footage circulating on social media that purported to be hospital surveillance camera footage showed about a dozen undercover officers, most of them armed, dressed as women wearing Muslim headscarves, or hospital staff in scrubs or white lab coats. One wore a surgical mask and carried a rifle in one arm and a folded wheelchair in the other. The emergency services were seen patting down a man who was kneeling against a wall with his arms raised.
Israel has been heavily criticized for its raids on hospitals in Gaza, which have served as a refuge for displaced people and also as a vital but difficult lifeline for the tens of thousands of Palestinians wounded in the war. Gaza's health system, weak even before the war, is on the brink of collapse amid high numbers of patients, lack of resources – including fuel and medical supplies blocked by Israeli restrictions – and repeated fighting over it collapsed around and inside hospitals.
Israel says militants use hospitals, particularly in Gaza, to hide or launch operations from there. The military has found underground tunnels near hospitals and says it has located weapons and vehicles used in the Oct. 7 attack on the hospital grounds.
The war was sparked by Hamas' attack when hundreds of militants stormed the border, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping about 250 others.
According to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, the attack triggered a devastating air, sea and ground offensive that killed more than 26,000 people in Gaza and injured more than 65,000. The ministry's count does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants but says about two-thirds of the dead were women and minors.
The United Nations says the fighting has sparked a humanitarian disaster, displacing 85% of the tiny coastal enclave's population, leveling large swaths of it and driving a quarter of residents to starvation. That crisis could soon deepen, the United Nations warned, amid a spate of funding cuts to the main aid provider to Palestinians in Gaza after Israel claimed a dozen of its workers took part in the Oct. 7 attack.
Violence in the West Bank has also increased since October 7 as Israel has cracked down on suspected militants, killing more than 380 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most were killed in clashes with Israeli forces during raids or violent protests.
The Israeli military says it has arrested nearly 3,000 Palestinians in the West Bank in the past four months.
The military said on Tuesday that forces had killed 27-year-old Mohammed Jalamneh, who it said was planning an imminent attack. The other two men killed, brothers Basel and Mohammed Ghazawi, were hiding in the hospital and were involved in attacks, the military claimed.
The military did not provide any information on how the three were killed. The statement said Jalamneh was armed with a pistol, but made no mention of an exchange of fire.
Hospital spokesman Tawfiq al-Shobaki said there was no exchange of fire and that the three were killed by Israeli forces in a targeted killing. He said the Israelis attacked doctors, nurses and hospital security during the raid.
“What happened sets a precedent,” he said. “There has never been an attack in a hospital. There were arrests and attacks, but no assassination.”
He said Basel Ghazawi had been in the hospital since October with hemiplegia, or partial paralysis.
Hamas claimed the three men as members and called the operation a “cowardly assassination.”
The raid took place in Jenin, long a bastion of the armed struggle against Israel, where the internationally backed Palestinian Authority and its security forces have barely gained a foothold. The city had been a frequent target of Israeli attacks even before the war began. Israeli operations there and in an adjacent refugee camp have left behind great destruction.
Israel occupied the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. More than half a million Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but along with Egypt imposed a crushing blockade on the area when Hamas came to power in a violent takeover in 2007.
The Palestinians claim these areas as part of their future independent state, whose hopes have increasingly dwindled since the start of the war.
Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been trying to negotiate a new deal between Israel and Hamas that could lead to a halt in fighting and the release of dozens of hostages still held in Gaza.
There was still no progress towards agreement.
Israel said Sunday's ceasefire talks were constructive but there remained “significant gaps” in a possible agreement.
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan told reporters in Beirut that discussions were continuing but that the group continued to insist on a more permanent ceasefire before more hostages were released.
The prime minister of Qatar, which has served as a key Hamas mediator, was more optimistic, saying U.S. and Middle Eastern mediators had agreed on a framework proposal for a ceasefire and the release of hostages that they would present to the militant group . Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told the Atlantic Council in Washington that mediators had made “good progress.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces were still fighting Palestinian militants in various parts of the Gaza Strip, even in areas where the army has been operating for months.
Israel issued an evacuation order for residents in the western part of Gaza City and urged them to move south. The military also said it had been fighting militants in recent days and carrying out airstrikes in other parts of the northern Gaza Strip, which came under attack in the early weeks of the war and where Israel claims it has largely crushed Hamas.
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Lidman reported from Jerusalem.
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