Nablus, West Bank — Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, saying it has killed nine Palestinian fighters as the nearly 11-month operation Gaza war showed no signs of abating, despite continued U.S. efforts to help broker a ceasefire. Violence has increased in the West Bank during the Gaza conflict, sparked by the unprecedented October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel by the Islamist group Hamas, in which the militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostage.
The war has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which makes no distinction between combatants and civilian casualties. It has also caused widespread destruction across the Palestinian territory, displacing nearly all of its 2.4 million people — many of them multiple times — a worsening humanitarian crisis.
In the West Bank, the Israeli military launched a series of coordinated raids in four cities — Jenin, Nablus, Tubas and Tulkarem — in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The military said it was conducting a “counterterrorism operation” involving airstrikes, ground troops and bulldozers.
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty
The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israeli forces killed at least 10 people, including two Palestinians in Jenin, four in a nearby village and another four in a refugee camp near Tubas. Fifteen others were wounded, the group said.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia and returned home to “discuss the latest developments in light of Israeli aggression in the northern West Bank,” official Palestinian media said.
The Israeli military said it had killed nine Palestinian “terrorists” during the ongoing operation, adding that there had been no casualties on the Israeli side so far. Soldiers encountered explosive devices and were engaged in live fire with militants, it said.
“We encountered explosives in the first few hours and there was live firing with terrorists engaged in combat,” spokesman Nadav Shoshani told reporters.
The troops were targeting a “mix of terrorist groups and terrorist cells,” he said, declining to say how many people were involved or how long the operation would last.
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty
Shoshani said the current operation was not “extremely different or special” after months of Israeli military operations in the West Bank.
However, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz had a different view, saying the army has been “operating at full strength since last night” in an effort to “dismantle the Iranian-Islamic terror infrastructure.”
In a social media post, he accused Iran, Israel’s biggest enemy in the region, of trying to “build an eastern front against Israel” based on the “model” of Gaza and Lebanon, where it supports Hamas and Hezbollah respectively.
“We must address this threat with the same determination we use against terror infrastructures in Gaza, including temporary evacuation of residents and all necessary measures,” he said. “This is a war, and we must win it.”
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israeli forces or settlers have killed more than 650 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to an AFP tally based on figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry. At least 19 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials.
Although Israeli military operations have become a daily occurrence in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israeli forces since 1967, it is rare for them to be carried out in multiple cities simultaneously.
In recent weeks, Israeli operations in the West Bank have focused mainly on the north of the region, where armed groups fighting Israel are particularly active.
The latest operation comes two days after Israel said it had carried out an airstrike in the West Bank, killing five people, according to the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli military confirmed the five deaths on Wednesday and said the strike hit a structure “used by the terrorists to carry out terrorist activities and harm (Israeli) soldiers operating in the area.”
Issam Rimawi/Anadolu/Getty
One of the dead was identified as Jibril Jasan Ismail Jibril, who was released in November as part of the only ceasefire negotiated in Gaza so far, which lasted about a week.
Last week, the military announced that it had killed a senior Palestinian militant in Lebanon, accusing him of “carrying out attacks and smuggling weapons” into the West Bank and collaborating with Iranian forces.
Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian Islamist movement affiliated with Hamas that has a strong presence in the northern West Bank, issued a statement Wednesday morning condemning an “open war” by Israel.
“With this aggression, which aims to transfer the burden of the conflict to the occupied West Bank, the occupying power wants to impose a new situation in order to annex the West Bank,” the statement said.
Hamas, whose popularity in the West Bank has soared since the start of the war in Gaza, reiterated its call on Tuesday night for Palestinians in the area to “rise up”.
The statement came in response to comments by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who said this week that he would build a synagogue on the focal point of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem if he could. Ben Gvir, himself a settler, has openly called for annexation of the West Bank.
