JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank (AP) — Israeli forces killed at least nine Palestinians, including a 60-year-old woman, and wounded several others in a raid in a hotspot area of the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Palestinian officials said, in one of the deadliest days in years in the area of.
A gun battle erupted as the Israeli military conducted a rare daytime operation in the Jenin refugee camp which it said was intended to prevent an impending attack on Israelis. The camp, where the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group has a key base, has been the focus of Israeli arrest raids for nearly a year.
At least one of the dead was identified by Palestinians as a militant, but it was not clear how many others belonged to armed groups.
Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have risen since Israel launched night raids in the West Bank last spring following a spate of Palestinian attacks. The conflict has only intensified this month as Israel’s far-right government took office and vowed to take a tough line against the Palestinians.
Amid the rise in violence, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will arrive in the region in the coming days urging steps that could improve Palestinians’ daily lives.
Images released by Palestinian media showed the charred exterior of a two-story building, as well as concrete blocks and other debris strewn on a street. The military said it entered the building to detonate explosives, which it said were used by the suspects.
After troops withdrew from the area after the three-hour operation, several cars were overturned, their windshields and windows shattered as local residents ran around to inspect the damage.
Palestinian Health Minister May Al-Kaila said paramedics were struggling to reach the wounded during the fighting, while Akram Rajoub, the Jenin governor, said the military prevented rescue workers from evacuating the wounded.
Both officials accused the military of firing tear gas at a hospital’s children’s ward, causing children to suffocate. Video from the hospital showed women carrying children into a hospital corridor.
The military said the forces blocked roads to facilitate their operation, which may have complicated rescue teams’ efforts, and that tear gas was likely poured into the hospital from the clashes nearby.
Jenin Hospital identified the woman who was killed as Magda Obaid, and the Israeli military said it was examining reports of her death. The Palestinian Ministry of Health previously identified another of the dead as Saeb Azriqi, 24, who was taken to hospital in critical condition after being shot and died of his wounds. And the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — an armed militia affiliated with Fatah, the secular political party that controls the Palestinian Authority — claimed one of the dead, Izz al-Din Salahat, as a combatant. The ministry said at least 20 people were injured.
According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, May 14, 2021 was the deadliest day in the West Bank since 2002. Thirteen Palestinians were killed in various confrontations that day.
Internationally-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning and ordered flags to be flown at half-mast. Palestinian officials called on the international community to comment.
“We ask the international community to help the Palestinians against this far-right government and protect our citizens,” said Rajoub, the governor of Jenin.
UN envoy to the Middle East Tor Wennesland said he was “deeply alarmed and saddened” by the violence and called for calm. Condemnations came from the Organization for Islamic Cooperation and Turkey, which recently resumed full diplomatic relations with Israel, as well as from neighboring Jordan and the militant Islamic group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.
Tensions over violence in the West Bank have spilled over into the Gaza Strip in the past.
“The resistance’s response to what happened today in the Jenin camp will not be delayed,” warned Saleh Aruri, a senior Hamas official.
The coastal enclave’s branch of Islamic Jihad has repeatedly fought Israel, most recently in a bitter three-day clash last summer that killed dozens of Palestinians and shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem last year, making 2022 the deadliest in those areas since 2004, according to B’Tselem. So far this year 29 Palestinians have been killed.
Israel says most of the dead were militants. But youth protesting against the raids and others not involved in the clashes were also killed. So far this year, not counting Thursday, a third of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or civilians had links to armed groups.
Around 30 people were killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis last year.
Israel says its crackdowns serve to disrupt militant networks and thwart attacks. The Palestinians say they are further cementing Israel’s 55-year, indefinite occupation of the West Bank, which Israel captured along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War. The Palestinians claim these areas for their hoped-for state.
Israel’s new far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and backed by ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, has pledged to put settlement expansion in the West Bank at the top of its list of priorities and has already announced a raft of punitive measures against Palestinians for not doing so urged the UN’s highest judicial body to give their opinion on the Israeli occupation.
Israel has already established dozens of settlements in the West Bank, which are now home to around 500,000 people.
The Palestinians and much of the international community view settlements as illegal and an obstacle to peace, even though negotiations to end the conflict have stalled for more than a decade.
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Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press writers Areej Hazboun and Isabel DeBre in Jerusalem, Jon Gambrell in Dubai, and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.