4 Palestinians slain during Israeli raid in West Bank
Over 90 people killed in the area so far this year
JERUSALEM — Four Palestinian militants were killed Wednesday during an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian health officials, in one of the deadliest confrontations in the territory this year.
The men were among more than 90 Palestinians and two Israeli security officials killed in the West Bank so far in 2022, the biggest spasm of violence there in seven years.
Israeli military raids have surged in the West Bank since March, when the Israeli army began an operation to curb a wave of Arab attacks in the spring that killed 19 Israelis and foreigners, some of which were perpetrated by Palestinians from the West Bank.
Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers within the West Bank have also increased during the same period, amid rising Palestinian resentment at the increase in Israeli raids; frustration at the entrenchment of the 55-year occupation; and an unwillingness by the Palestinian Authority, the body that administers nearly 40 percent of the West Bank, to crack down on militants operating within its small pockets of control.
The violence is also fueled by the emergence of new militant networks outside the direct control of the main Palestinian armed groups. It has also been exacerbated indirectly by tensions within the Palestinian leadership as would-be successors to Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s 87-year-old president, jockey for influence.
The violence Wednesday began after the Israeli army raided a suburb of Jenin, a city in the northern West Bank that has been at the center of confrontations for months. A Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot dead during a similar raid in May in the same neighborhood, most likely by Israeli fire, the Israeli army acknowledged this month.
The army said it had entered Jenin on Wednesday to arrest two wanted militants, including the brother of a gunman who killed three Israeli civilians outside a bar in Tel Aviv in April. The raid set off an hourslong gunbattle as militants in the neighborhood, armed with assault rifles, attempted to block the Israeli incursion.
The Palestinian health ministry later said the brother was among the four people killed and 44 injured during that fighting, an unusually high number. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — an armed militia affiliated with Fatah, the secular political party that controls the authority — later said that three of the four slain men were members of the militia, and a fourth belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller Islamic group.
A photograph posted to social media Wednesday showed one of the four wearing the uniform of Palestinian military intelligence, an arm of the Palestinian Authority that coordinates with Israeli counterparts.
In general, analysts say, the Palestinian Authority’s recent reluctance to take action against armed groups this year is partly rooted in an unwillingness to target individuals with connections to either Fatah or the authority itself.
Senior Israeli officials have regularly criticized the authority in recent weeks for failing to do enough to stamp out militancy in its areas of control. In turn, authority officials say that the regularity of Israel’s raids are exacerbating the situation and making it harder for the authority to act without seeming like an arm of the Israeli state.
Founded after the Oslo accords in the 1990s, the authority and its security forces coordinate with the Israeli army and police, partly in an effort to build trust before the establishment of a Palestinian state. But with hopes of statehood all but extinguished, the arrangement increasingly attracts the ire of Palestinians, recent polling showed. Some Palestinian security officials have broken ranks over the years, joining the militants they are nominally meant to police.