On the fourth day of a vast operation “anti-terrorist” Israeli forces in the occupied Palestinian territory, fighting took place on Saturday, August 31 in the north of the West Bank, according to the Israeli army. In the Gaza Strip, where the war has been going on for almost eleven months, Israel continues its deadly offensive in response to the bloody attack perpetrated by the Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7.
Gaza’s civil defence said it had pulled 29 bodies from the rubble since dawn and transported dozens of wounded to hospitals across the devastated Palestinian territory. In Jenin, in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory separated from Gaza, the sound of fighting echoed on Saturday in the deserted streets, where only Israeli armoured vehicles circulated. An Israeli drone and two military helicopters flew over the city in the morning.
The Israeli army also announced that it had “deleted” On the night of Friday into Saturday, two Palestinians were preparing to carry out explosive attacks near settlements in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967. “A terrorist attempted to carry out a car bomb attack” near the Gush Etzion settlement block, then a second was chased “Infiltrated Karmei Zur”another settlement further south, the army said. Two Palestinian groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, welcomed a “coordinated attack”.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 20 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army since Wednesday, most of them fighters, during operations launched simultaneously in three towns in the north of this occupied territory. The Israeli army claims to have killed “20 terrorists”The dead included an 82-year-old man, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, and two teenagers aged 13 and 17, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which also counted 55 wounded since Wednesday.
An “anti-terrorist” operation
Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, and Islamic Jihad said at least 13 of the dead were fighters from their armed wings. They say, like other Palestinian groups, they are resisting Israeli troops in the West Bank.
Since Friday, Israeli soldiers have been patrolling only the city of Jenin and its refugee camps, a symbolic stronghold of Palestinian armed groups fighting Israel, after having withdrawn from Tubas and Tulkarem and their refugee camps, tearing up streets and carrying out attacks, including air strikes, against vehicles or houses where Palestinians were staying.
The Israeli army launched this operation described as“anti-terrorist” sending columns of armoured vehicles supported by aircraft to Jenin, Tulkarem, Tubas and their refugee camps, strongholds of armed groups fighting Israel, raising fears in the international community of an escalation of violence.
Israeli attack on refugee camp
Israeli raids into the Palestinian autonomous zone are a daily occurrence in the West Bank, where deadly violence has erupted since the start of the Gaza war on Oct. 7, but rarely on such a scale. In the Gaza Strip, nine adults from the same family, including two women, were killed in the shelling on Saturday morning of a house in the Nousseirat refugee camp, Marwan Abou Nassar, a doctor at Al-Awda hospital where their bodies arrived, told Agence France-Presse.
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Overnight, an Israeli strike targeted the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory, causing deaths and injuries, according to Ahmed Al-Kahlout of the civil defence in Gaza. In the south of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported the deaths of five people in a bombing of a house in Khan Younes. However, the Israeli army announced on Friday that it had ended its ground operations in the Khan Younes and Deir Al-Balah regions.
The war was sparked by a Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, which killed 1,199 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data. Of the 251 people kidnapped that day, 103 are still held in Gaza, 33 of whom have been declared dead by the army.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, as well as the United States and the European Union. In response, its military launched a major offensive in the Gaza Strip that left at least 40,602 people dead, according to the Hamas government’s health ministry, although these figures have not been independently verified.
