WEST BANK: Israel launched a large-scale military operation on Wednesday (Aug 28) in the occupied West Bank, where the army said it killed nine Palestinian fighters, while the nearly 11-month Gaza war showed no sign of abating.
Violence has surged in the West Bank during the Gaza conflict sparked by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas’s unprecedented Oct 7 attacks on Israel last year.
The war has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. It has also caused widespread destruction in the Palestinian territory, displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million people at least once and triggered a humanitarian crisis.
In the West Bank in the early hours of Wednesday, the Israeli military launched a series of coordinated raids across four cities – Jenin, Nablus, Tubas and Tulkarem.
The army said it was carrying out a “counter-terrorism operation” involving air strikes, ground forces and bulldozers.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said the Israeli forces killed at least 10 people, including two Palestinians in Jenin, four in a nearby village and four more in a refugee camp near Tubas. Fifteen others were wounded.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia and headed home to “follow up on the latest developments in light of the Israeli aggression on the northern West Bank”, Palestinian official media said.
The Israeli army said it had killed nine Palestinian “terrorists” in its ongoing operation, adding that so far there were no casualties on the Israeli side.
Soldiers encountered explosives and were engaging in exchanges of live fire with militants, it said.
“We have met explosives already in the first hours, and we have met real-time fire exchanged with terrorists engaging in battle,” spokesman Nadav Shoshani told reporters.
The troops were targeting a “mixture of terror groups and terror cells”, he said, declining to say how many were involved or how long the operation would last.
Shoshani said the current operation was not “extremely different (from usual army activity in the area) or special”.
Source: CNA
