By Ali Sawafta and Raneen Sawafta
JENIN, West Bank (Reuters) -Israeli forces killed three Palestinians and injured at least 13 others in an attack on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Thursday, the Palestinian Health Ministry and doctors said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said it was treating at least six people who were shot, four who suffered shrapnel injuries and one person who was run over by a military jeep. He said his teams came under fire while recovering some of the dead.
The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces exchanged fire with militants during an operation in Jenin. It said forces killed some militants and injured others, including those who threw explosives, without specifying how many.
A military helicopter hit the area, the military added, and a suspect was arrested.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the end of a security assessment in the West Bank on Thursday, said that although Israel faced “complicated international pressure,” it was determined to change the security reality in the area.
“Israel is engaged in a difficult battle on many fronts. We are fighting in the south, we are fighting in the north, we are also fighting in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical name for the West Bank.
The West Bank is among the territories that Israel conquered in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians want this to be the nucleus of their future independent state and say the expansion of Israeli settlements in the area is an obstacle to achieving that goal.
Since the start of the war in Gaza last October, the West Bank, where Palestinians living under Israeli military rule exercise limited self-governance, has become a secondary front.
But violence was already on the rise, with the United Nations reporting a record number of Palestinians killed in 2023 due to an increase in military raids and attacks on settlers.
According to the UN, more than 500 Palestinians and 12 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank since October 7.
A video shared on social media, which Reuters was unable to immediately verify, appeared to show a helicopter firing at the Jenin refugee camp, a densely populated urban area.
Residents of the countryside and the city reported hearing gunshots.
The Jenin camp has been a focal point of attacks by the Israeli military, which claims to carry out such operations to arrest suspects and prevent attacks against Israelis. In an attack in May, the military carried out an airstrike on the camp, a rarity in the West Bank.
Some Palestinian groups say they engage in armed struggle to resist Israel’s decades-old military occupation.
According to the UN Palestine Refugee Agency (UNRWA), some 23,600 camp residents were registered as refugees – people who were expelled or fled their homes during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel, or its descendants.
(Reporting by Ali Sawafta and Raneen Sawafta; additional reporting and writing by Henriette Chacar; editing by Andrew Heavens and Josie Kao)
