Israeli forces killed at least 10 Palestinians in the West Bank in overnight raids and airstrikes they said were intended to contain attacks on Israelis using Iranian-supplied arms.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed the dead were all militants, and Hamas said 10 of its fighters had been killed. Israel said the West Bank operations, some of the most extensive in recent years, were likely to go on for some days, in what it described as a preventive campaign to forestall attacks on Israelis.
Palestinian health authorities said 10 people were killed in the Jenin and Tubas areas of the West Bank, and gun battles were reported to be continuing on Wednesday morning.
The chief spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the escalation of Israeli military operations on the West Bank, at the same time as the war in Gaza, would “lead to dire and dangerous results”.
“The world must take immediate and urgent action to curb this extremist government that poses a threat to the stability of the region and the world as a whole,” Abu Rudeineh said, according to the Palestinian news agency, Wafa.
Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said the operations were intended to “thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructures”. Israel claimed that all those killed were militants.
“Iran is working to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank, according to the Gaza and Lebanon model, by financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan,” Katz said in a post on X.
He suggested that evacuation orders for civilians should be issued for the West Bank, of the sort used to empty districts before IDF operations in Gaza.
Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said he was not aware of any such evacuation orders. Later in the day, the IDF said it had advised residents of the Nur Shams refugee camp, east of Tulkarm, that they could leave for their own safety, and that roads were being secured so they could do so. The IDF also admitted it had accidentally damaged a pipe supplying the camp with water.
Tariq Shahada, a 35-year-old resident of Nur Shams, said by phone from the camp: “A huge amount of soldiers, equipment and gear and more than 50 armoured personnel carriers are in Tulkarm city, preparing to invade Nur Shams camp.”
A few hours later, early on Wednesday afternoon, Shahada added: “The Israeli soldiers are searching house by house. The situation is really dangerous. They wanted us to leave voluntarily, but no one would dare to leave the camp now without the Red Cross with them. It is too dangerous.”
Since 7 October last year, according to UN figures, 128 Palestinians, including 26 children, have been killed by airstrikes in the West Bank. The Israeli army and police have stepped up security operations significantly this week. The UN said there were 183 search-and-arrest operations across the West Bank including East Jerusalem in the last week, resulting in 113 Palestinians being detained.
A spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office, Ravina Shamdasani, said that the IDF operations risked “seriously deepening the already catastrophic situation”, and that two of the dead were reportedly children, bringing the overall death toll in the West Bank since 7 October to 637.
“This represents the highest number of fatalities over a period of eight months since the UN first started recording casualties in the West Bank two decades ago,” Shamdasani said.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had carried out operations in three areas of the West Bank: Jenin, Tulkarm and Far’a refugee camp, near Tubas. Israeli military activity was also reported around the city of Nablus.
Shoshani portrayed the raids and airstrikes as pre-emptive operations designed to stop planned attacks against Israelis, comparing them to Sunday’s airstrikes in Lebanon just before a Hezbollah rocket and drone launch against Israel.
The Palestinian governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Roub, said in a radio interview that the IDF had informed him it planned to raid the government hospital in the city, and called for international intervention to prevent it.
Shoshani said Israeli forces were seeking to prevent the hospital from being used as a terrorist stronghold but had no plans to seize it and take it over. The Medical Aid for Palestinians charity quoted a doctor in Jenin hospital as saying there were severe restrictions on medical staff entering and leaving the building in the morning but that later the IDF had stopped surrounding the hospital and movements had returned to normal.
Nibal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said the situation in other medical centres in the northern West Bank was “extremely bad”.
“Our medical teams in Tubas, Tulkarm, and Jenin are facing obstruction by Israeli forces while trying to perform their humanitarian duties in reaching the injured Palestinians,” Farsakh said. “Israeli forces stormed the medical point in al-Far’a camp, detained the medical teams and prevented them from any communication tools.”
Shoshani, however, said the raids had been launched in response to a rising level of attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians in recent months, coming in particular from Jenin and Tulkarm, which have long been militant strongholds.
“In the past year, over 150 shooting and explosive attacks have originated from these areas alone,” Shoshani said. He said a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on 18 August, the first one in the city for eight years, had been planned in Jenin, and that roadside bombings in ambushes had increased. Two IDF soldiers were killed by such bombs in recent weeks.
The Israeli spokesperson linked the increase in attacks to the smuggling of arms into the West Bank, which the IDF says is being orchestrated by Iran. “We’ve seen Iranian attempts to actively smuggle weapons and explosives into Judea and Samaria [the official Israeli name for the West Bank] to be used against Israeli civilians for terror purposes – a systematic strategy of Iran to fund, arm and support terrorist groups across the Middle East,” Shoshani said.
Most reports of recent Palestinian bomb attacks have suggested the explosives involved were made locally.
Since the Gaza war began on 7 October last year, 19 Israelis – soldiers and civilians – have been killed in attacks on the West Bank. Over the same period, more than 650 Palestinians – the numbers of militant fighters and civilians within this figure are not clear, but it includes 143 children, according to the UN – have been killed by Israeli security forces as well as by extremist Israeli settlers, whom the Israeli Shin Bet security agency says are using terrorism to seize Palestinian land.
• This article was amended on 29 August 2024. An earlier version incorrectly stated that, according to UN figures, 128 Palestinians had been killed by airstrikes in the West Bank “in the first three weeks of August”. This figure actually relates to deaths from airstrikes since 7 October 2023 and the text has been corrected.
