Wednesday, the Israeli military attacked four cities in the occupied West Bank. The army said it killed 9 Palestinian “fighters,” and the war in Gaza, which has been going on for almost 11 months, showed no signs of ending.
The number of deaths from violence in the West Bank and Gaza has also gone up. The Gaza health minister says that more than 40,000 people have died. It has also destroyed a lot of things, forced almost all of Gaza’s 2.4 million people to move at least once, and started a humanitarian disaster.
In the early hours of Wednesday, Israeli military attacked four towns in the West Bank: Jenin, Nablus, Tubas, and Tulkarem.
Israeli armoured trucks went into Jenin as well as two refugee camps, Tulkarem and Tubas.
An operation began in Jenin, Nablus, Tubas, and Tulkarem, and Mahmud Abbas cut short his trip to Saudi Arabia.
By noon, they had blocked the entrances to the towns and camps, and soldiers were shooting at the camps.
The army in Israel said it was looking for roadside bombs while bulldozers dug up asphalt from the streets.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said that the Israeli military attacked and killed nine people and hurt fifteen others in the raids. This is more than the 10 deaths that they had previously said.
Israeli aggression on the northern West Bank caused Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to cut short his trip to Saudi Arabia and go home to “follow up on the latest developments.” This is what Palestinian official media said.
The Israeli FM says
Israel Katz, the foreign minister, had a different view. He said that the military had been “operating in full force since last night” to “dismantle Iranian-Islamic terror infrastructure.”
Iran is Israel’s biggest enemy in the area, and he said in a post on X that Iran wants to “establish an eastern front against Israel” by following the “model” it has set up in Gaza and Lebanon by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
Katz said, “We must deal with this threat with the same resolve we used against the ‘terror infrastructures’ in Gaza. This includes evacuating residents temporarily and taking any other steps that are needed.”
Israeli military attacked actions happen every day in the West Bank, which Israel has controlled since 1967, but they don’t usually happen in more than one city at the same time.
In the past few weeks, Israel’s actions in the West Bank have mostly been in the north, where it says armed groups are active.
Patients leave the hospital After Israeli military attacked
The Israeli army said last week that it had killed a top Palestinian militant in Lebanon. They said that he was working with Iranian forces and “directing attacks and smuggling weapons” to the West Bank.
Islamic Jihad is a Palestinian Islamic movement with a strong presence in the northern West Bank. It is allied with Hamas and released a statement early Wednesday morning calling for an “open war” by Israel.
“This aggression is meant to shift the conflict’s weight to the occupied West Bank, and the occupier wants to change the situation on the ground in order to take over the West Bank,” the statement said.
On Gaza, the UN Security Council is going to meet
Al Jazeera says that the UK and Switzerland have asked the UN Security Council to meet in New York later today to talk about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
This comes after Israeli troops fired on a “clearly marked UN humanitarian convoy” in the enclave that included the World Food Program.
On X, the UK’s mission to the UN said, “The UN has warned that aid operations and staff in Gaza are at risk, at a time when a vaccine campaign is needed right away to stop a polio outbreak.”
