Israeli forces yesterday killed five Palestinians in a raid on a West Bank refugee camp, Israeli security officials said.
The raid, which the military said was meant to arrest suspects allegedly involved in a botched attack on Israelis, was likely to further exacerbate tensions in the region.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health did not immediately confirm the deaths, saying only that three were injured, one of them critically.
Photo: AFP
The violence came amid one of the deadliest periods in the past few years in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the first weeks of Israel’s new government, its most right-wing ever, which has promised to take a tough stance against Palestinians.
The military said it was operating to apprehend the suspects behind a failed shooting attack at a West Bank restaurant, where attackers allegedly were thwarted by a weapon malfunction.
The shooters then fled the scene, the military said, adding that the attackers were members of the Hamas militant group that rules the Gaza Strip and has elements in the West Bank as well.
In yesterday’s operation, the military said it was searching for the militant cell that it said had sealed itself inside a home in the refugee camp.
During the search, troops encountered the shooters and a gun battle erupted, the military said, adding that several of the shooters who were killed were involved in the attempted attack on the restaurant.
The Israeli security officials said that two of the five killed were Hamas militants involved in the attempted attack. The three others were shooters who had exchanged fire with troops during the raid.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the raid with the media.
The raid came days after an earlier incursion in the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, which is near the Palestinian city of Jericho, a desert oasis in an area of the West Bank that rarely sees such unrest, where troops were also searching for the suspects.
Since the shooting last month at the nearby settlement, the Israeli military has blocked access to several roads into Jericho — a closure that has placed the city under a semi-blockade, disrupting business and creating hours-long bottlenecks at checkpoints that affected even Palestinian security forces, footage showed.
Yesterday’s violence came days after an Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp killed 10 Palestinians, mostly militants but also a 61-year-old woman.
The next day, a Palestinian shooting attack outside an east Jerusalem synagogue killed seven people, including a 14-year-old.
The Israeli army has ramped up near-nightly raids in the occupied West Bank since a series of deadly Palestinian attacks within Israel in spring last year. Over the past year and a half of escalating raids, Jericho has remained a sort of sleepy desert town, spared much of the violence.
The Palestinian Authority, in retaliation for last week’s raid into the Jenin refugee camp, declared a halt to security coordination with Israel.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed last year in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, making it the deadliest year in those areas since 2004, figures by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem showed.
About 30 people were killed in Israel by Palestinians last year.
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