Israel today launched a massive military operation in the West Bank, where the army said it killed nine Palestinian fighters, as the nearly 11-month-long Gaza war shows no sign of ending.
Violence has escalated in the West Bank during the Gaza war following unprecedented attacks on Israel by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on October 7.
The war has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. It has also caused widespread destruction, displaced nearly all of Gaza’s 2.4 million people at least once and sparked a humanitarian crisis.
On Wednesday morning Israeli forces in the West Bank launched a series of coordinated raids in four cities – Jenin, Nablus, Tubas and Tulkarem.
Squads of Israeli armoured vehicles entered two refugee camps in Tulkarem and Tubas and Jenin.
By afternoon, they were blocking entrances to towns and camps, and soldiers were firing on the camps, where sounds of gunfire and explosions could be heard, AFP photographers reported.
Israeli bulldozers ripped up asphalt from roads, with the army saying it was searching for roadside bombs.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israeli forces killed nine people and wounded 15 others in the raid, down from an earlier figure of 10.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas cut short his visit to Saudi Arabia and returned home to “follow the latest developments in light of the Israeli aggression on the northern West Bank”, Palestinian official media said.
The Israeli military said it had killed nine Palestinian “terrorists”, and had so far suffered no casualties.
Army spokesman Nadav Shoshani said troops encountered explosives and were exchanging gunfire with militants. He declined to say how many were involved or how long the operation would last.
He said the operation was “not very different or special from normal military activity in the area.”
‘This is war’
However, Foreign Minister Israel Katz had a different view, saying the military had been working with full force since last night “to destroy the Iranian-Islamist terrorist infrastructure.”
In a post on X he accused Iran, Israel’s main enemy in the region, of seeking to “establish an eastern front against Israel” based on the “model” of Gaza and Lebanon, where it supports Hamas and Hezbollah, respectively.
“We must address this threat with the same vigor as we did against terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including by temporarily evacuating residents and taking other necessary measures,” Katz said.
“This is a war and we must win it.”
Israeli soldiers or settlers have killed more than 650 Palestinians in the West Bank since a Hamas offensive on October 7, according to an AFP count based on Palestinian health ministry data.
At least 19 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials.
Although Israeli military operations have become a daily occurrence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since 1967, they are rare for them to occur simultaneously in multiple cities.
In recent weeks, Israel’s West Bank operations have been focused on the northern part of the territory, where armed groups are particularly active.
Patient escapes from hospital
Last week the army announced it had killed a senior Palestinian militant in Lebanon, accusing him of “directing attacks and smuggling weapons” to the West Bank and collaborating with Iranian forces.
Islamic Jihad, the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Islamist movement which has a strong presence in the northern West Bank, issued a statement on Wednesday condemning what it called “open warfare” by Israel.
“With this aggression, which aims to shift the burden of the conflict to the occupied West Bank, the occupier wants to impose a new status quo on the ground in the occupied West Bank,” the statement said.
Hamas, whose popularity has surged in the West Bank since the Gaza war began, reiterated its call late Tuesday for Palestinians living in the territory to “rise up.”
The statement came in response to comments by far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who said this week that he would build a synagogue at Jerusalem’s controversial Al-Aqsa Mosque compound if possible.
Ben Gvir, himself an immigrant, has openly called for the annexation of the West Bank.
In Gaza, distressed families continue to flee in accordance with evacuation orders from the Israeli military.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said one of the latest attacks targeted the area around the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, from where “about 650 patients have fled”.
The medical charity says on its website that it “quickly opened a field hospital and has begun receiving patients, despite a severe shortage of supplies and resources”.
MSF said the field hospitals are not a solution, “but a last resort in response to Israel’s collapse of the healthcare system.”
Gaza’s civil defense agency said at least 12 people were killed in the new Israeli attacks, including at least one child and a woman.
Hamas attacks on October 7 killed 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 40,534 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The United Nations human rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
