Israeli forces killed at least nine Palestinians in the West Bank in overnight raids and airstrikes they said were intended to contain attacks on Israelis using Iranian-supplied arms.
Palestinian health authorities said that nine people had been killed in the Jenin and Tubas areas of the West Bank, and gun battles were reported to be continuing on Wednesday morning.
The main spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the escalation of Israeli military operations on the West Bank, at the same time as the war in Gaza, would “lead to dire and dangerous results”.
“The world must take immediate and urgent action to curb this extremist government that poses a threat to the stability of the region and the world as a whole,” Abu Rudeineh said, according to the Palestinian news agency, Wafa.
Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said the operations were intended to “thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructures”. Israel claimed that all nine people killed were militants.
“Iran is working to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank, according to the Gaza and Lebanon model, by financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan,” he said in a post on X.
Katz suggested that evacuation orders for civilians should be issued for the West Bank, of the sort used to empty districts before IDF operations in Gaza.
Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said he was aware of no such plans, but the Wafa agency reported on Wednesday afternoon that the Israeli army had ordered residents of the Nur Shams refugee camp east of Tulkarm, to leave the camp within four hours, and that Israeli soldiers had set up checkpoints to search Palestinians as they left. The agency also reported that the IDF had imposed a curfew in east Jenin.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had carried out operations in three areas in the West Bank, Jenin, Tulkarm and al-Far’a refugee camp, near Tubas.
In Tulkarm, Shoshani said “three armed terrorists who posed a threat to the security forces were eliminated in a precise aerial attack”.
“In areas of Jenin, the forces eliminated two additional armed terrorists, apprehended five wanted suspects and located and confiscated weapons, including M16s [assault rifles] rifle parts, ammunition and additional military equipment.” Shoshani said.
At al-Far’a camp, the spokesperson said “an aircraft struck and eliminated four armed terrorists that posed a threat to the forces”.
He said there had been no Israeli casualties by mid-morning on Wednesday but added that “real-time exchange of fire with terror groups” was under way in the Jenin and Tulkarm areas.
Shoshani portrayed the raids and airstrikes as pre-emptive operations designed to stop planned attacks against Israelis, comparing them to Sunday’s airstrikes in Lebanon just ahead of a Hezbollah rocket and drone launch against Israel.
The Palestinian governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Roub, said in a radio interview the IDF had informed him it planned to raid the government hospital in the city, and called for international intervention to prevent it. Shoshani said Israeli forces were seeking to prevent the hospital being used as a terrorist stronghold but had no plans to seize it and take it over.
He said that there had been a rising level of attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians in recent months, coming in particular from Jenin and Tulkarm, which have long been militant strongholds.
“In the past year, over 150 shooting and explosive attacks have originated from these areas alone,” Shoshani said. He pointed to a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on 18 August, the first one in the city for eight years, which he said had been planned in Jenin, and also noted a rise in roadside bombs used in ambushes. Two IDF soldiers were killed by such bombs in recent weeks.
Shoshani said the attacks had been carried out by an array of groups, including local militants with only vague connections to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who both condemned the Israeli raid as an attempt to spread the Gaza war to the West Bank.
The Israeli spokesperson linked the upsurge in attacks to the smuggling of arms into the West Bank, which the IDF says is being orchestrated by Iran.
“We’ve seen Iranian attempts to actively smuggle weapons and explosives into Judea and Samaria [the official Israeli name for the West Bank] to be used against Israeli civilians for terror purposes – a systematic strategy of Iran to fund, arm and support terrorist groups across the Middle East,” Shoshani said.
Most reports of recent Palestinian bomb attacks have suggested the explosives involved were locally made.
Since the Gaza war began on 7 October last year, 19 Israelis – soldiers and civilians – have been killed in attacks on the West Bank. Over the same period, over 650 Palestinians – the numbers of militant fighters and civilians are not clear – have been killed by Israeli security forces as well as by extremist Israeli settlers, who the Israeli Shin Bet security agency says are using terror to seize Palestinian land.