There are at least three Palestinians killed in the West Bank when Israel stages a raid

The Jenin refugee camp, a flash point for Palestinian-Israel violence, is a humanitarian and military operation, the U.N. says

Israel says the raids are meant to stop Palestinians from carrying out attacks. The Palestinians say there will be more violence in the absence of political dialogue and increased West Bank settlement construction.

The Jenin camp and a nearby town of the same name have been a flash point for Israeli-Palestinian violence. Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin.

Israeli media said the military also conducted airstrikes, reviving a tactic it had largely halted during the past two decades, after a Palestinian uprising against Israel’s open-ended occupation slowly fizzled.

Palestinian attacks since the start of this year have killed 24 people. A string of Palestinian attacks last year prompted Israel to intensify its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also died.

In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemns Israel’s incursion, as did the Palestinian self-rule government in the West Bank.

The spokesman said that Israel had launched the operation because 50 attacks had originated from Jenin over the course of a year.

The military said it demolished tunnels beneath a mosque in the refugee camp after discovering weapons and explosives during Tuesday’s operations. The army had arrested at least 120 Palestinians since Monday.

United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Lynn Hastings says between 3,000 and 6,000 Palestinians have fled the area of fighting. That’s 25% of the Jenin refugee camp’s total population, according to the U.N. Water and electricity supplies were cut for most of the camp due to infrastructure damaged by the military operation, she said.

Earlier in the day, rubble littered the streets of Jenin and there were reports of damage to shops. Columns of black smoke periodically punctuated the skyline over the camp, which along with an adjacent town of the same name has been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022. It was also a hotbed of Palestinian militant activity in the uprising in the early 2000s.

The Hamas militant group claimed responsibility for the Tel Aviv attack Tuesday. Israeli police say the Palestinian driver, identified by local media as a 20-year-old man from a West Bank village near Hebron, rammed his vehicle into pedestrians at an outside shopping center, then exited the car and stabbed people with a sharp object. Paramedics say an Israeli civilian shot and killed him.

The second intifada, which claimed thousands of life, was a period when the current violence is not the same. It’s limited in scope, with Israeli military operations concentrating on several strongholds of Palestinian militant groups.

It bore hallmarks of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces growing pressure from his ultranationalist political allies for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four people.

The large-scale raid of the Jenin camp, which began Monday, is one of the most intense military operations in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades.

The attack came as Israeli troops pressed ahead with their hunt for Palestinian militants and weapons in a refugee camp, after military bulldozers tore through alleys and thousands of residents fled to safety. The two-day Palestinian death toll rose to 10.

JENIN, West Bank (AP) — A Palestinian man drove his car into a crowded bus stop in Tel Aviv on Tuesday and then began stabbing people, wounding eight in an attack praised by the Islamist militant group Hamas as a response to Israel’s ongoing military operation in the occupied West Bank.

The Jenin government hospital: When Israeli troops attacked, civilians ran out and wounded people hid in the camp, Israel’s refugee camp

“Some medical staff are assuming great risks and walking into the Jenin camp to help. Humanitarian staff and ambulances must be allowed into the camp, and electricity and drinking water restored,” Hastings said.

The hospital nurse said that she could hear the gunfire as it rang out outside the hospital. He gave himself a first name, Nawras.

The Jenin government hospital is next to a refugee camp. Medics claim Israeli troops fired teargas at the entrance of the hospital as young men threw rocks and rudimentary explosives at them. Bandaged young men with injured limbs sat on the hospital floor while families sought shelter in the courtyard and nearby streets.

Jenin government hospital director Dr. Wissam Bakr said the roads leading to the camp were destroyed by the Israeli army because they were booby trapped.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said anyone who thinks an attack like this will deter us from continuing our battle against terror is mistaken.