Israeli officials say airstrike in the West Bank kills at least three Palestinian militants
An Israeli airstrike has killed at least three Palestinian militants traveling in a car in the northern West Bank near the town of Jenin, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials. The Islamic Jihad militant group claimed the three dead men as members. The airstrike occurred as raids of the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip raged on for a third day.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said three passengers in the car were killed in Wednesday’s strike near the town of Jenin, while another was wounded. The Islamic
Jihad militant group claimed the three dead men as members.
The Israeli army said that all four occupants of the car were wanted militants.
Over the past few years Jenin has become a major flashpoint in the decades long Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Violence across the occupied West Bank has surged since the Israel-Hamas war broke out last Oct. 7, when Palestinian militants broke into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers semi-autonomous parts of the West Bank, has a limited foothold in Jenin. At least 435 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli fire since the conflict broke out, according to Palestinian health officials.
PALESTINIAN POLL: SUPPORT FOR HAMAS HAS DROPPED
A poll of Palestinian public opinion shows that support for Hamas has dropped since the last such survey in December, but the militant group remains the preferred political party among Palestinians.
The poll, released Wednesday by the West Bank-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, asked Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which political party they favor and 34% said Hamas, 17% preferred Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah, 11% favored a third party and 37% said none or that they didn’t know.
In the last poll, 43% of Palestinians preferred Hamas compared to 17% for Fatah.
More than five months into the devastating war, more than 70% of Palestinians in Gaza say they support Hamas’ decision to attack Israel on Oct. 7, up from 57% in December’s poll.
In the West Bank, support for the attack dropped from 82% in December to 71%. Nearly twothirds of Palestinians say they expect Hamas to win the war.
The survey asked Palestinians in Gaza about their food insecurity, and 55% said they do not have enough food to last a day or two.
Those findings were similar to November’s results, but due to security concerns the poll did not send data collectors to question Palestinians in northern Gaza, where the humanitarian crisis is at its most acute.
The poll questioned 1,580 adults, 830 in the West Bank and 750 in the
Gaza Strip between March 5-10 and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
MOURNERS PRAY OVER 28 KILLED IN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES
Mourners held funeral prayers Wednesday morning outside a hospital in central Gaza for 28 people killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes on urban refugee camps.
Associated Press footage showed mourners praying over the bodies, which were wrapped in funeral shrouds, before the bodies were taken away in donkey carts for burial.
Nineteen people, including five women and nine children, were killed when a strike flattened a family home late Tuesday in the urban Nuseirat refugee camp. Another person was killed in a separate strike in the camp.
A strike in the nearby Bureij camp killed eight people, including three women.
The dead were brought to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital, the main medical facility in central Gaza. An Associated Press reporter saw the bodies and their names in hospital records.
Nuseirat and Bureij are among several dense, built-up refugee camps in Gaza that date back to 1948, when an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the war surrounding its creation. Refugees and their descendants make up a majority of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million.