Ten Palestinians have been killed in the northern occupied West Bank, a spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent told AFP on Wednesday, with the Israeli army saying it was carrying out “a counter-terrorism operation”.
Two Palestinians were killed in the city of Jenin, four in a car bombing in a nearby village and four others in a refugee camp near the city of Toubas, said Ahmed Jibril, spokesman for the Red Crescent.
He added that he had so far counted “15 injured”.
Israeli incursions into Palestinian autonomous areas are a daily occurrence in the West Bank. However, it is rare for them to be carried out simultaneously in several cities, as was the case on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday.
Since the start of the war between Israel and the Gaza Strip, triggered by the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Israel on October 7, the Israeli army has also carried out several air raids on refugee camps and towns in the Palestinian territory, occupied by Israel since 1967.
Air raids
In recent weeks, Israeli operations in the West Bank have focused on the north of the territory, where armed groups fighting against Israel are particularly active.
“The army has been operating with all its forces since nightfall in the Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps to dismantle the Iranian-Islamist terrorist infrastructures established there,” commented Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
On the social network X, he accused the Islamic Republic of Iran of wanting to “establish a terrorist front in the east in Judea and Samaria”, the biblical name for the West Bank used by the Israelis, “on the model of Gaza and Lebanon”, where Hezbollah, a great ally of Tehran, has been firing rockets at Israel almost daily since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip.
He further claims that “sophisticated weapons are being smuggled from Jordan” into the West Bank.
A week ago, Israel announced that it had killed in an airstrike a leader of the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah in Lebanon, also accusing him of “arms trafficking” to the West Bank on behalf of the ideological army of the Islamic Republic.
The Israeli army announced that it had killed five Palestinians in an air raid on the Nour Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem on Monday evening.
She specified on Wednesday that on this occasion she had notably “eliminated Jibril Jibril, involved in terrorist activities in Tulkarem and Qalqiliya, who had been released in November as part of the agreement” to exchange hostages (kidnapped on October 7 and taken to Gaza) for Palestinian prisoners incarcerated by Israel.
“Annexing the West Bank”
Since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, more than 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army or settlers, according to official Palestinian data, and at least 20 Israelis, including soldiers, in Palestinian attacks or during army operations in the Palestinian autonomous zone, according to official Israeli data.
Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian Islamist movement allied with Hamas, particularly established in the refugee camps in the northern West Bank, has denounced an “open war by the Israeli occupier.”
“With this aggression that aims to transfer the weight of the conflict to the occupied West Bank, the occupier wants to impose a new state of affairs on the ground to annex the West Bank,” he accused in a statement.
For its part, Hamas, whose popularity has risen in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza, while that of its rival, the Palestinian Authority, has fallen, regularly calls on the West Bank to “rise up”.
He reiterated his call on Tuesday evening, urging the three million Palestinians in the West Bank to respond to a new controversy launched the day before by Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right Israeli minister who openly calls for annexing the West Bank.
Mr Ben Gvir had drawn the ire of many Arab capitals and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation by questioning the wisdom of the status quo on Jerusalem’s Esplanade of the Mosques, saying he could see himself building a synagogue there.