Jerusalem: Hundreds of Israeli troops backed by drones and armored vehicles carried out raids in the occupied West Bank, Israeli and Palestinian officials said Wednesday, a growing third front in conflicts that extend from the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip to southern Lebanon.
At least 10 Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, in what Israeli officials described as an ongoing operation targeting militants and concentrated in Jenin and Tulkarm, two West Bank cities that an Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said have become militant strongholds. The Israeli military said it had killed nine militants.
A Palestinian armed group based in Jenin said it had fired on Israeli forces in two villages on the city’s outskirts, and Palestinian residents in both cities described hearing intermittent gunfire.
The operation followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory, where nearly 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel, according to the United Nations, in violence involving both the Israeli military and extremist Jewish settlers. Israel has also arrested thousands of Palestinians suspected of involvement in armed groups.
That increasingly deadly campaign has unfolded alongside Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, touched off by the Oct. 7 attack, and the cross-border strikes traded with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The raid comes as U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is operating a clandestine smuggling route across the Middle East to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory. The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, has been to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as it can, The New York Times reported in April.
Israeli ground troops this week have been pushing into Khan Younis in southern Gaza, and Gaza health authorities said Wednesday that Israeli strikes had killed 58 Palestinians in the enclave over the past day.
The military said Wednesday that it had recovered the body of a soldier kidnapped on Oct. 7. It was not clear from the military’s statement whether the soldier had been taken to Gaza dead or still alive; it said it was withholding his name at the request of his family.
A day earlier, Israeli troops rescued the hostage Farhan al-Qadi, whom they had found alone in a warren of tunnels they were investigating in the enclave. More than 100 hostages remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are presumed dead by the Israeli authorities.
The United Nations said Wednesday that one of its vehicles in Gaza had been targeted by Israeli gunfire. It was “a clearly marked U.N. humanitarian vehicle, part of a convoy that had been fully coordinated” with the Israeli military, said Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesperson. Ten bullets hit the vehicle, but no one was hurt, he said.
The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, said it had been operating the vehicle, and that in response to the shooting, it was suspending staff movements in Gaza.
The Israeli military said the incident “is under review.”
As a measure of the geographic breadth of the fighting, the Israeli military said Wednesday that in addition to its actions in Gaza and the West Bank, it had attacked what it said was a terrorist operating on the Syria-Lebanon border, as well as structures in southern Lebanon belonging to Hezbollah, the militant group allied with Iran.
But Israeli raids have failed to tamp down the armed groups in the West Bank. They have also put thousands of Palestinian civilians in the crossfire.
“People are living in a state of terror and anxiety,” said Kamal Abu al-Rub, the Palestinian governor of Jenin, who described the Israeli incursion as unusually fierce. The sounds of intermittent gunfire and explosions resounded through the city, he said, adding that Israeli officials had informed their Palestinian counterparts that they were imposing a formal curfew on parts of the city and that soldiers had surrounded Jenin’s hospitals, and the city’s entrances and exits.
The raids appeared to be the largest since last year. In July 2023, about 1,000 Israeli soldiers carried out a 48-hour incursion in Jenin that killed 12 Palestinians, at least nine claimed by militant groups as members. In December, a three-day raid on the same city killed 12.
The raids on Wednesday sent panic through Jenin. Salam Azaizeh was on her way home from a job cleaning a wedding hall when a large contingent of Israeli forces engaged in gunbattles with armed fighters.
Israeli bulldozers ripped up roads, reflecting what the military has called a growing threat of improvised explosives buried beneath the pavement.
Azaizeh, 34, took cover in a neighbor’s home, where she remained trapped for the past day. “No one can go outside,” she said. “We’re hearing frightening sounds.”
Fearful of Israeli snipers on rooftops or of having their homes stormed by soldiers, Palestinians huddled inside Wednesday. Israeli military officials have said that when they raid people’s homes, they are searching for suspects and weapons or want to use them as lookout points.
Jenin is synonymous with Palestinian rebellion, the site of a major battle between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers during the second intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation in the early 2000s. Israelis also recall Jenin as the home of numerous people who carried out deadly bombings and attacks. More recently, the impoverished city has been a hotbed for recruiting by militant groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others that have emerged among a disaffected younger generation.
Israeli officials said more than 150 shooting and explosive attacks on Israelis have emanated from the Jenin and Tulkarm areas over the past year.
The Israeli military has carried out nearly daily raids into Palestinian towns and cities in the occupied West Bank since Oct. 7. But for residents of a neighborhood known as the Jenin camp, the incursion Wednesday felt different from many of the previous military raids.
Israeli forces often withdraw within hours after arresting suspected militants or engaging in gunbattles with them. This time, its forces were still present in the area as of Wednesday afternoon and had set up roadblocks consisting of dirt mounds, residents said.
Shoshani, the Israeli military spokesperson, told reporters Wednesday that Israeli forces were in “the first stages of this operation.”
Muhammad Al-Masri was at home in Jenin when the Israeli forces invaded his neighborhood, bringing armored vehicles and bulldozers. Some of his neighbors fled as Israeli forces closed in, but most remained in their homes, he said.
“No one knows what is happening,” said Al-Masri, a former member of the local committee that administers the camp. “Will it last days or hours?”