Israeli forces reportedly kill 10 Palestinians in West Bank
JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Israeli forces Thursday killed nine Palestinians — including at least seven militants and a 61-year-old woman — in the deadliest single incident in the occupied West Bank in two decades, Palestinian officials said.
The raid prompted Palestinian leaders to cut security ties with Israel, a move that could lead to more violence.
The Israeli military also fatally shot a 22-year-old Palestinian later in a separate incident.
The raid in the Jenin refugee camp increases the risk of a major flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian fighting, poses a test for Israel’s new hard-line government and casts a shadow on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s expected trip to the region next week.
Raising the stakes, the Palestinian Authority said it would halt the ties that its security forces maintain with Israel in a shared effort to contain Islamic militants. Previous threats have been short-lived, in part because of the benefits the authority enjoys from the relationship and also due to U.S. and Israeli pressure to maintain it.
The PA already has limited control over scattered enclaves in the West Bank, and almost none over militant strongholds like the Jenin camp. But the announcement could pave the way for Israel to step up operations it says are needed to prevent attacks.
Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, threatened revenge for the raid. Violent escalations in the West Bank have previously triggered retaliatory rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces in the West Bank and on the Gaza frontier went on heightened alert. Palestinians filled the streets, chanting in solidarity with Jenin, and President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning.
In the refugee camp, residents dug a mass grave for the dead.
Thursday’s gunbattle that left nine dead and 20 wounded erupted when Israel’s military conducted a rare daytime operation in the Jenin camp that it said was meant to prevent an imminent attack on Israelis. The camp, where the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group has a major foothold, has been a focus of near-nightly Israeli arrest raids.
Hamas’ armed wing claimed four of the dead as members, while Islamic Jihad said three others belonged to the group. An earlier statement from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a militia loosely affiliated with Abbas’ secular Fatah party, claimed one of the dead was a fighter named Izz al-Din Salahat, but it was unclear if he was among those seven militants.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the 61-year-old woman killed as Magda Obaid, and the Israeli military said it was looking into reports of her death.
The Israeli military circulated aerial video it said was taken during the battle, showing what appeared to be Palestinians on rooftops hurling stones and firebombs on Israeli forces below. At least one Palestinian can be seen opening fire from a rooftop.