Seven Palestinians died Tuesday in clashes that broke out in an Israeli army raid on the Jenin refugee camp, a city in the northern West Bank that, along with an adjacent urban refugee camp, has long been a bastion of armed struggle. against Israel. In addition, nine Palestinians are injured, two of them in serious condition, as confirmed by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Among the dead were a surgeon from the Jenin hospital, Aseed Jabareen, “attacked at the entrance to the medical center when he was going to work,” and teacher Allam Jadarat and a student, who were in a school, reported the director of the hospital. hospital, Wissam Bakr, quoted by the official Palestinian agency Wafa.
According to Wafa, Israeli forces broke into the Jenin camp, and entered its central streets with military armored vehicles, which unleashed armed clashes both in the countryside and in other neighborhoods of the city and in the nearby village of Burqin. The Israeli military reported on Telegram that Israeli forces had “begun a counterterrorism operation in Jenin aimed at targeting armed men in the area.”
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group confirmed that its fighters fought against Israeli forces. Images spread on social media show separate attacks on two bulldozers with what appeared to be an explosive device and a car bomb.
The West Bank, occupied by Israel, is experiencing its greatest spiral of violence since the Second Intifada (2000-05), and so far in 2024 at least 184 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, most of them alleged militiamen or attackers, but also civilians, including more than thirty minors, according to the Efe agency count, after closing 2023 as the deadliest year in two decades with more than 520 deaths.
On the Israeli side, ten people have died in eight Palestinian attacks in 2024, including four uniformed personnel and six civilians, three of them settlers.
The Israeli army intensified its already frequent incursions into the West Bank after the Hamas attack on October 7 and, since then, some 513 Palestinians have died in violent incidents with Israel, mainly with troops but also with settlers.