Global Courant
JERUSALEM — Israeli drones struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank on Monday morning and hundreds of troops were deployed to the area, an incursion similar to the large-scale military operations conducted during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least five Palestinians were killed.
Troops remained in Jenin refugee camp on Monday, continuing the largest operation in the area in more than a year of fighting. It came at a time of growing domestic pressure to respond harshly to a string of attacks on Israeli settlers — including a shooting last week that left four people dead.
Black smoke rose from the busy streets of the camp as the army pressed on. Electricity was cut off in some parts and military bulldozers plowed through the narrow streets – another reminder of Israel’s incursions during the last uprising. The Palestinians and neighboring Jordan condemned the violence.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said the operation began just after 1 a.m. with an airstrike on a building used by militants for attack planning. He said the purpose of the operation was to destroy and seize weapons.
“We don’t intend to stand,” he said. “We act against specific targets.”
He said a brigade-sized force — about 2,000 soldiers — took part in the operation and that military drones had launched a series of strikes to clear the way for ground forces. While Israel has launched isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday’s string of attacks marked an unprecedented escalation since 2006 — the end of the Palestinian insurgency.
While Israel described the attack as a targeted operation, smoke billowed from the overcrowded camp, with mosque minarets nearby. Ambulances rushed to a hospital, where the injured were taken on stretchers.
Armored bulldozers drove through narrow streets clearing the way for troops and damaging property in their path. Residents reported power cuts in large parts of the camp.
According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, seized houses and buildings and deployed snipers on rooftops.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said on Monday that at least five Palestinians were killed and 27 injured, three of them critical. Hecht said as many as seven militants were presumed dead.
In another incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.
“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag and remain steadfast on their land despite this brutal aggression,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, said in a statement. .
Jordan called on Israel to end its raids on the West Bank.
The Jenin Camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a focal point as Israeli-Palestinian violence has escalated since the spring of 2022. Jenin has long been a bastion for the armed struggle against Israel and was a major point of friction in the latest Palestinian uprising.
In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing killed 30 people during a large Passover gathering, Israeli forces launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp. For eight days and nights they battled militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of houses, many booby-trapped.
Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a rocket was fired from the area last week and landed in the West Bank.
“There’s been a dynamic around Jenin here over the last year,” Hecht said, defending Monday’s tactic. “It’s been getting more intense all the time.”
But there may also have been political considerations. Leading members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have called for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.
“Proud of our heroes on all fronts and especially this morning of our soldiers operating in Jenin,” tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultra-nationalist who recently called on Israel to kill “thousands” of militants if necessary. “Praying for their success.”
Monday’s events bring the death toll of Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year to 133, part of a more than year-long spike in violence that led to the worst bloodshed in that area in nearly two decades.
The outbreak of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids on the West Bank.
Israel says the raids are designed to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and with increasing settlement building in the West Bank and violence by extremist settlers. They see the intensification of the Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israel’s 56-year indefinite occupation of the area.
Israel says most of the dead are militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the raids and people not involved in the clashes have also been killed.
Palestinian attacks on Israelis since the beginning of this year have killed 24 people.
Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians seek those areas for their hoped-for independent state.
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Associated Press writer Omar Akour contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.
