March 07, 2023, Gaza: Israeli forces have killed at least six Palestinians and wounded 11 others during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, according to the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry.
Two of the wounded people had serious injuries, the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. Witnesses told AFP news agency that a house was besieged by the Israeli forces and hit with rockets. Footage circulating on social media showed helicopters over a column of military vehicles entering the city.
Israeli authorities said one of the Palestinian men they killed was behind the shooting of two brothers from an illegal settlement near the Palestinian village of Huwara last week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said troops had “eliminated” the gunman who killed two Israeli settlers in the West Bank last month.
Al Jazeera’s Sara Khairat, reporting from Ramallah, said that another raid by Israeli forces was also carried out on Tuesday evening in another refugee camp south of Nablus. The army entered a building in the Askar refugee camp and arrested three men, including two sons of a 49-year-old man killed in Jenin. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, called the use of rockets in Jenin on Tuesday an act of “all-out war,” Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
Abu Rudeineh accused the Israeli government of being “responsible for this dangerous escalation which threatens to inflame the situation and destroy all efforts to restore stability.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken overnight reiterated calls for both sides to de-escalate tensions in the West Bank, and the violence is also expected to be raised by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin when he visits Israel this week.
