Israeli forces killed five Palestinian gunmen in a raid on a West Bank refugee camp on Monday, in keeping with Israeli security officials. The raid, which the military said was meant to arrest suspects allegedly involved in a botched attack on Israelis, was more likely to further exacerbate tensions within the region.
The Palestinian Health Ministry didn’t immediately confirm the deaths, saying only that three were injured, certainly one of them critically.
The violence comes amid certainly one of the deadliest periods lately within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the primary weeks of Israel’s latest government, its most right-wing ever, which has promised to take a troublesome stance against the Palestinians.
The military said it was operating to apprehend the suspects behind a failed shooting attack at a West Bank restaurant, where attackers allegedly were thwarted by a weapon malfunction. The attackers then fled the scene, the military said, adding that they were members of the Hamas militant group that rules the Gaza Strip and has elements within the West Bank as well.
In Monday’s operation, the military said it was looking for the militant cell that it said had sealed itself inside a house within the refugee camp. Throughout the search, troops encountered the gunmen and a gun battle erupted. The military said several of the gunmen who were killed were involved within the attempted attack on the restaurant.
The Israeli security officials said two of the five killed were Hamas militants involved within the attempted attack. The three others were gunmen who had exchanged fire with troops throughout the raid. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to debate the raid with the media.
The raid comes days after an earlier incursion within the Aqabat Jabr camp, which is near the Palestinian city of Jericho, a desert oasis in an area of the West Bank that rarely sees such unrest, where troops were also looking for the suspects.
For the reason that shooting last month on the nearby settlement, the Israeli military has blocked access to several roads into Jericho — a closure that has placed the town under a semi-blockade, disrupting business and creating hourslong bottlenecks at checkpoints that affected even Palestinian security forces, footage showed.
Monday’s violence comes days after an Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp killed 10 Palestinians, mostly militants but in addition a 61-year-old woman. The subsequent day, a Palestinian shooting attack outside an east Jerusalem synagogue killed seven people, including a 14-year-old.
The Israeli army has ramped up near-nightly raids within the occupied West Bank since a series of deadly Palestinian attacks inside Israel last spring. Over the past 12 months and a half of escalating raids, Jericho has remained a form of sleepy desert town, spared much of the violence.
The Palestinian Authority, in retaliation for last week’s raid into the Jenin refugee camp, declared a halt to security coordination with Israel.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed last 12 months within the West Bank and east Jerusalem, making it the deadliest 12 months in those areas since 2004, in keeping with figures by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. Some 30 people were killed in Israel by Palestinians in 2022.
The Israeli army says many of the Palestinians killed have been militants. But stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in confrontations have also been killed.
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem within the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for his or her hoped-for independent state.
