The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, spoke of a “heroic” attack, speaking of “a first response to the crimes (…) in the Jenin camp” in the occupied West Bank.
A car-ramming attack injured seven people in Tel Aviv (Israel) on Tuesday (July 4th) as the Israeli army continued a large-scale operation in Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank, in which 11 Palestinians were killed.
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, welcomed an attack “heroic”speaking “of a first response to the crimes (…) in the Jenin camp”. Israel has been carrying out its largest military operation there since Monday in the occupied West Bank for several years.
According to preliminary reports, a car attacked civilians in north Tel Aviv, Israeli police said, adding that they had “neutralized the assailant”. At the scene of the attack, police chief Yaakov Shabtai said the “terrorist” was a West Bank resident shot dead by a passerby. “It appears that the suspect was driving a vehicle going south to north, drove into pedestrians who were on a shopping street and got out of his vehicle to stab civilians with a sharp object”police said.
“Worst raid in five years”
In Jenin, shops remained closed on Tuesday, an AFP correspondent reported, on the second day of an operation mobilizing hundreds of Israeli soldiers in this city and the adjacent refugee camp. The almost deserted streets are strewn with debris and stones, the bitumen is gutted and the roadway is blackened around improvised barricades.
The army announced that it had struck “a joint operations center” of a local armed group, the Jenin Brigade, an arms depot, a site “of observation and recognition” and a cache. “One Hundred and Twenty Palestinian Suspects” have been apprehended since Monday, while “that around 300 armed terrorists are still in Jenin, most of them in hiding”the army said.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, 11 Palestinians were killed and 100 were injured, 20 of them in serious condition. “We received a lot of injuries”notably “by bullets”said Qasem Benighader, a nurse at the Jenin hospital. “This is the worst raid in five years.”
“The recent operation in the occupied West Bank and the car bombing in Tel Aviv ominously underline an all too familiar pattern of events: violence only breeds more violence”, worried the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, on Tuesday. “The killings, bodily harm and destruction of property must stop.”