JENIN: The nearly 11-month-old Gaza conflict showed no signs of ending as Israel began a massive military operation on Wednesday in four cities of the occupied West Bank. The army claimed to have killed nine Palestinian “fighters” in this operation.
More than 40,000 people have died as a result of the recent increase in violence in Gaza’s West Bank, according to the ministry of health there. In addition, it has resulted in extensive damage, at least one time for every one of Gaza’s 2.4 million residents to be displaced, and a humanitarian disaster.
The Israeli military attacked Jenin, Nablus, Tubas, and Tulkarem in the early hours of Wednesday in the West Bank.
Israeli armoured car columns broke into Jenin and two refugee camps, Tubas and Tulkarem.
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By lunchtime, soldiers were firing at the camps while they blocked the towns’ and camps’ entrances.
The army claimed that Israeli bulldozers removed asphalt from the streets in search of roadside explosives.
The Palestinian Red Crescent updated its initial death toll of ten to nine, saying that Israeli forces killed nine and injured fifteen during the operations.
In order to “follow up on the latest developments in light of the Israeli aggression on the northern West Bank,” Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas canceled his trip to Saudi Arabia and returned home, according to Palestinian official media.
Nine Palestinian “terrorists” have been slain, according to the Israeli army, which has not yet suffered any losses.
According to army spokeswoman Nadav Shoshani, soldiers were engaging in gunfire with insurgents after coming across explosives. He remained silent when asked how many people were involved or how long the procedure would take.
He clarified that the operation wasn’t “very different (from regular army activity in the area) or special.”
Israeli FM’s assertion
Speaking differently, however, was Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who said that the military was “operating in full force since last night” in an effort to “dismantle Iranian-Islamic terror infrastructure.”
He accused Iran, the primary adversary of Israel in the region, of attempting to “establish an eastern front against Israel” in a post on X, citing its support for Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon as the “models” for these two regions.
Katz declared, “We have to confront this threat with the same resolve we used to destroy ‘terror infrastructures’ in Gaza, including evacuating residents temporarily and taking any other necessary action.”
In the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, military operations by the Israelis are a regular occurrence, but they seldom occur in many cities at once.
Israel’s operations in the West Bank have concentrated in recent weeks on the northern section of the territory, where it alleges there is a high concentration of armed organizations.
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A prominent Palestinian militant was slain in Lebanon, the Israeli army said last week. The militant was accused of “directing attacks and smuggling weapons” into the West Bank and working with Iranian forces.
Early on Wednesday, Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian Islamic outfit with close ties to Hamas and a foothold in the northern West Bank, released a statement criticizing Israel’s “open war.”
The statement stated, “The occupier wants to impose a new state of affairs on the ground to annex the West Bank with this aggression, which aims to transfer the weight of the conflict to the occupied West Bank.”
