A new wave of violence has swept the occupied West Bank, with a series of major raids launched by the Israeli military across much of the territory, amid further intense fighting and bombardment in Gaza.
Israeli forces remained in Tulkarem, in the north of the West Bank, on Thursday afternoon, more than 36 hours after launching a raid on a refugee camp there.
“There is a very strong siege on Tulkarem. It is a very terrible situation. We have never seen anything like this,” said Dr Radwan Bleible, at the al-Zakat hospital in the town.
Bleible said at least seven people had been killed by Israeli forces, and a dozen injured, raising the overall death toll in the West Bank since Wednesday to at least 12. Wednesday was of the highest single daily total for many months.
In Gaza, internet and mobile services have been down for five days, the longest of several outages during the war, according to the internet access advocacy group NetBlocks. The outages complicate rescue efforts and make it difficult to get information about the latest strikes and casualties.
The Israeli offensive was launched after the 7 October Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Palestinian authorities said casualties in Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli offensive were approaching 25,500, two-thirds of them women and children. Thousands more are believed to be buried under rubble.
Palestinian medics said an Israeli airstrike on a home killed 16 people on Thursday, half of them children, in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
Dr Talat Barhoum, at Rafah’s el-Najjar hospital, confirmed the death toll from the strike and said dozens more people had been wounded. Footage from the hospital showed relatives weeping over the bodies of loved ones.
Underlining growing regional tensions, sirens sounded in the Israeli Red Sea port city of Eilat, and an explosion was heard suggesting the interception of an incoming rocket. Eilat has been targeted repeatedly by Iranian-aligned Yemeni Houthis, who say they are attacking it in solidarity with Hamas and the wider Palestinian cause.
Israeli officials have promised to dismantle Hamas to ensure it can never repeat an attack such as the 7 October one, but hopes of a swift and decisive military campaign have proved misplaced.
Yaakov Amidror, an Israeli former major general and national security adviser, said Israeli military operations in Gaza would last through 2024 and possibly into 2025.
Israeli military analysts now refer to the West Bank as a “third front”, after Gaza and the confrontation with Lebanon-based Hezbollah.
The operation in Tulkarem began early on Wednesday, leading to clashes with armed militants. Several improvised bombs were detonated as the army advanced into the refugee camp’s narrow alleys, with exchanges of fire between soldiers and the mostly young militants in the camp lasted much of the day.
Images on social media showed large columns of Israeli armoured vehicles and armoured bulldozers driving into Tulkarem refugee camp. Israeli media reported that a soldier had been injured in clashes with militants in the camp, which is a stronghold of several armed factions.
The Israeli military confirmed it carried out an airstrike during the raid, adding that “a number of terrorists were killed”.
A separate airstrike near the entrance to the Balata refugee camp, east of the city of Nablus, killed five fighters with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas’s, Fatah party.
The group said a Palestinian militant, Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal, had been killed. The Israeli army said he had been responsible for a “number of terrorist attacks” in the past year, including one in annexed East Jerusalem, adding that he was killed after intelligence “of his cell’s intentions of carrying out an imminent terrorist attack”.
Before the airstrike, Israeli forces had conducted a raid in Balata camp, leading to clashes involving automatic weapons and pipe bombs. Similar operations were reported in Nablus, Qalqilya and near Hebron, in the south of the West Bank.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said soldiers had blocked its ambulances from reaching Tulkarem to evacuate wounded people, which Bleible confirmed. “They are arresting all the men they can find, even the ambulance team. It is the worst that we have ever seen,” he said.
There was no immediate response to the claim from Israeli officials.
In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, a total of 355 Palestinians have been killed, including 90 children, since 7 October, according to UN statistics. Of these, it said, 346 were killed by Israeli forces, eight by Israeli settlers and one by either Israeli forces or settlers.
In the same period, five Israelis, including four members of Israeli forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Four Israelis died in an attack carried out by Palestinians from the West Bank in west Jerusalem in November and an Israeli woman was killed in another attack in Israel by Palestinians on Monday.
Tulkarem was targeted by another major Israeli raid two weeks ago, with residents saying about 100 men from the camp had been detained and held for between 24 and 48 hours. The raid caused widespread damage, with a social centre, houses and the main road into Tulkarem bulldozed.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since the six-day war of 1967 and its troops regularly carry out incursions into Palestinian communities, but these have intensified in recent weeks.
Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, warned on Sunday that Hamas was inciting violence in the West Bank, and called for Israel to ease measures imposed by far-right ministers that have weakened the ability of Palestinian authorities to maintain order.
Israel blames the high civilian death toll in Gaza on Hamas, accusing it of using the local population as a shield. Officials in Jerusalem said the Israeli military had killed roughly 9,000 militants, without providing evidence, and that 193 Israeli soldiers had been killed since the Gaza ground offensive began.
Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press contributed to this report
