The Tel Aviv attack comes on the second day of Israeli-Palestinian military operations in the Jenin refugee camp – a flashpoint in the 1967 Mideast war
The Tel Aviv attack came on Tuesday as Israel conducted its second day of a military campaign in the West Bank against what it says is a hub of Palestinian militants and weapons. Israel has used a huge amount of ground troops in theWest Bank for the first time in more than a decade. Around 100 Palestinians were wounded, and 11 of them were killed, according to Israel.
The Jenin camp is at the center of recent Israeli-Palestinian violence and is near an adjacent town. Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin.
Israeli media reported that the military resumed a tactic it had largely stopped two decades ago after a Palestinian uprising against Israel’s open-ended occupation slowly petered out.
More than 150 Palestinians are dead in the West Bank this year, and violence has been going on for a year. At least 26 people have been killed by Palestinian attacks.
Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and also people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.
Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want to become their own state.
The Palestinian self-rule government in the West Bank and three Arab countries with normalized ties with Israel – Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – condemned Israel’s incursion, as did the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
The spokesman for the Israeli military said Monday that Israel had launched an operation because of 50 attacks from Jenin over the course of a year.
During Tuesday’s operations, the military said it seized weapons and explosives and demolished tunnels beneath a mosque in the refugee camp. Israeli media said that the army had arrested around 120 suspected Palestinians over the course of five days.
Between 3,000 and 6,000 Palestinians have fled the fighting in the area. The United Nations believes the Jenin refugee camp’s total population is around 24,000. The military operation damaged infrastructure and caused the water and electricity supplies to be cut for most of the camp.
There were reports of damage to shops and rubble on the streets of Jenin. Columns of black smoke periodically punctuated the skyline over the camp, which along with an adjacent town of the same name has been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022. It was also the epicenter of Palestinian militant activity in the early 2000s.
The Hamas militant group praised Tuesday’s attack in Tel Aviv as “heroic and revenge for the military operation in Jenin” and later claimed the driver was a member, though it was not immediately clear if the attacker was dispatched by the group or acted on his own. Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, also praised the assault.
But the current violence is also different from the intense years of what was known as the second intifada, a period that claimed thousands of lives. It’s more limited in scope, with Israeli military operations focused on several strongholds of Palestinian militants.
It bore hallmarks of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces growing pressure from his ultranationalist political allies for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four people.
One of the most intense military operations in the occupied West Bank in the past two decades has taken place in the Jenin camp.
TEL AVIV — A Palestinian car ramming and stabbing attack has wounded at least eight people in an upscale district of Tel Aviv, while as much as a quarter of the Palestinian population of the crowded Jenin refugee camp has fled an Israeli offensive there, the United Nations estimates.
A Palestinian man drove into a crowded bus stop in Tel Aviv and began attacking people with a knife, wounding eight in an attack praised by the militant group Hamas.
Israeli soldiers threw rocks and explosives at a Jenin hospital: The attack of a refugee camp is not stopping the fight against terror
The medical staff is walking into the camp to help. Humanitarian staff and ambulances must be allowed into the camp, and electricity and drinking water restored,” Hastings said.
The nurse told NPR that she could hear the gunshots as they rang out outside the hospital. He gave only his first name, Nawras.
The hospital was next to a refugee camp and the scene was frantic. Medics say Israeli troops were firing tear gas at the entrance of the hospital, as young men threw rocks and rudimentary explosives at Israeli forces. Bandaged young men with various injuries sat on the hospital floor and families sought shelter in the hospital courtyard and nearby streets.
Israel’s army said it destroyed roads leading into to the camp, citing intelligence that the roads were booby trapped — and leaving only one road usable for ambulances to evacuate the wounded, Jenin government hospital director Dr. Wissam Bakr said.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, said that an attack like this won’t deter them from continuing their battle against terror.