Israeli army kills at least nine Palestinians in northern West Bank in worst attack in decades

According to Palestinian human rights organizations, soldiers are searching homes and deploying snipers in high-rise buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, closing off access to the city and the refugee camp, and bulldozers are destroying infrastructure. The entire operation is being carried out with heavy air cover, and the army has turned the evacuated settlements east of the city into military bases. The operation began at 4 a.m. local time, with a drone attack that killed at least three Palestinians traveling in a car between two cities south of Jenin. In the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm, a drone fired on another group of Palestinians, though no fatalities have been confirmed. The Israeli military confirmed the large-scale operation, justifying it as an operation to “eliminate direct terrorist threats,” and said all those killed were “armed militiamen.”

Dr. Wissam Bakr, director of Jenin General Hospital, said early this morning that the Israeli army was planning to attack the center, which has been under siege for weeks. The 220-bed hospital is the most important medical facility in the area. The head of the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said there were at least four martyrs in the Fara’a refugee camp in Tubas, and that its crews were unable to reach the area to evacuate the wounded because the occupation forces were preventing them.

Since the Israeli offensive on Gaza began in response to Palestinian attacks on October 7, Israel has intensified its military operations in the West Bank, where as of yesterday 638 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers, including 147 minors. . In the same period, 22 Israelis were killed (11 of them soldiers). Legislative changes have also been imposed: In March, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, passed a law allowing settlers to return to settlements abandoned after the unilateral withdrawal in 2005 under the government of Ariel Sharon, when Israel also withdrew from the Gaza Strip. Later, the government agreed to transfer authority in the West Bank to a new civilian authority, instead of the army. A decision that contravenes international law, which stipulates that the administration of occupied territories should be the responsibility of a military administration, not a civilian one. In a July resolution, the Knesset also refused to recognize a Palestinian state. All this indicates that, in light of the Gaza war, Israel is taking every step to annex the West Bank, which is why its foreign minister is talking about an all-out war. The two-state solution seems more and more unviable with each passing day.

Pressure on the Palestinian Authority

The situation in the West Bank puts the Palestinian Authority, which since the 1993 Oslo Accords has cooperated with Israel in controlling security in the Palestinian territories, and since Hamas won the 2006 elections, which Israel has not recognized, to the test. Israel, the United States or the European Union, do so only in the West Bank. Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli military operations are still concentrated in the center of the Palestinian territories, called on the Palestinian Authority this morning to “do its duty and protect our people” and members of the Palestinian security services to “take the decision with pride and dignity and confront the Zionist aggression and the settler gangs.” Palestinian groups in Gaza warned that the Israeli violence was “part of a Zionist plan to empty the West Bank of its residents.”