Israeli army launches attack on West Bank City
The Israeli military said Monday morning it had begun what it called a “widespread counter-terrorism effort” in the Jenin area of the occupied West Bank, a center of Palestinian militancy.
The army announced shortly after 1 a.m. that it was attacking “terrorist infrastructure”. the area of Jenin, a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank that has recently been the focus of deadly Israeli army attacks and fierce firefights between Israeli troops and militants. It has also been used as a launching point for Palestinian attacks on Israeli troops and civilians.
Israel began airstrikes and also moved ground troops into the city, according to initial reports in the Israeli news media, which reported that at least four Palestinian militants had been killed in the opening attacks.
The army said it struck a joint operations center used by militants in the Jenin refugee camp, which stores weapons and explosives and has housed individuals accused of carrying out attacks against Israelis in recent months.
Israel last carried out extensive airstrikes in the West Bank during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, of the early 2000s.
A week ago, a missile was launched from the Jenin area but exploded shortly after it took off, according to military and video footage. While militant groups in the Palestinian coastal area of Gaza have been firing rockets at Israel for more than 20 years, militant groups in the occupied West Bank have not developed the same capabilities.
A Israeli invasion of Jenin on June 19 was fatal, with at least five Palestinians killed in a shootout, including a 15-year-old girl, and dozens of other Palestinians wounded, according to Palestinian health officials.
Eight members of the Israeli security forces were also wounded in the fighting that day, which erupted after a raid to arrest two Palestinians suspected of terrorism, which the Israeli military said escalated into prolonged gunfights.
For the first time in decades, Israeli helicopter gunships were sent into the area to assist troops trying to free armored vehicles that had been knocked out by a powerful roadside bomb. Israeli analysts said the roadside bomb is reminiscent of the kind Israeli forces have encountered in southern Lebanon in recent decades.
Residents of the northern West Bank have recently witnessed an explosive mix of violence. There are attacks on Israelis by armed local Palestinian militias; almost daily arrest raids by the Israeli army; and reprisals by extremist Jewish settlers, who have swept through Palestinian villages and set fire to property.
Palestinian security forces remain largely outside the hotbeds of militancy in the northern West Bank, creating a vacuum and signaling what analysts have described as a loss of control.
Members of the coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – the most right-wing in Israel’s history – have pushed for a more aggressive military response to the attacks on Israelis.
This year has so far proved to be one of the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank in more than a decade, with more than 140 Palestinians killed in the area in the past six months. Most were killed in armed clashes during military raids, although some were innocent bystanders. This year was also one of the deadliest in years for Israelis, with nearly 30 killed in Arab attacks.
A day after the June 19 raid on Jenin, Palestinian gunmen killed four Israeli civilians, including a 17-year-old boy, near the Jewish settlement of Eli in the West Bank. The Palestinian gunmen were members of the armed wing of Hamas, the militant Islamist group that took control of the coastal area of Gaza in 2007 after winning elections the year before.
And a day after that, an Israeli drone strike killed three Palestinian militants in a car that the military said had just fired on an Israeli position in the north of the West Bank and carried out attacks on Jewish settlements in the area.
The murder of the four Israelis at Eli caused waves of reprisals by Israeli extremists rampaging through Palestinian towns and villages, setting fire to Palestinian homes, cars and fields.