Israel raid in West Bank enters second day after 8 killed

JENIN (AFP) : An Israeli raid on the West Bank city of Jenin stretched into a second day on Wednesday, an AFP correspondent reported, after eight Palestinians were killed the previous day.

Explosions and gunfire were heard from inside the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, the AFP correspondent said.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said Israeli troops had killed eight people and wounded nearly 20 during the raid, which began on Tuesday morning.

An AFP correspondent saw four bodies at Jenin’s Khalil Suleiman government hospital morgue.

The Israeli army said on Tuesday it had launched a “counterterrorism operation” in Jenin, adding later that “exchanges of fire are underway between the security forces and the armed terrorists”.

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa and medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported that surgeon Usaeed Jabareen, from the government hospital, was among those killed.

A schoolteacher and a student were also among the dead, Wafa reported, quoting hospital director Wissam Bakr.

The Israeli army said it had raided the house of Ahmed Barakat, who was suspected of involvement in an attack on an Israeli civilian last year.

Meir Tamari, 32, was killed in May 2023 at the entrance to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, medics and military officials said at the time.

The streets near the camp were deserted on Wednesday morning, except for Israeli military vehicles.

Drones buzzed overhead and sporadic gunfire rang out.

‘Criminal mentality’

Palestinian militant group Hamas called the raid a “massacre” and deemed it “conclusive evidence of the criminal mentality that rules the occupying state and its ideological belief in killing our people”.

The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas condemned the raid, saying in a statement on Wafa that Israel was “killing innocent people, doctors, and destroying the infrastructure of Palestinian hospitals, cities and villages”.

Jenin has long been a stronghold of Palestinian militant groups and the Israeli army routinely carries out raids into the city and adjacent camp.

The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has seen a surge in violence for more than a year, but particularly since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7.

At least 513 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers since the Gaza war broke out, according to Palestinian officials.

Attacks by Palestinians have killed at least 12 Israelis in the West Bank over the same period, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

The Gaza Strip has been gripped by more than seven months of war since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,647 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.