Israel launches largest occupied West Bank offensive since Second Intifada

Fayha Shalash

August 28, 2024

Israel launched its largest offensive on the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada, attacking three cities - Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas - from land and air.

Drone strikes were reported in the three cities as troops opened fire at Palestinians on the ground, killing at least nine people, including seven in Tubas and two in Jenin, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The assault began just after midnight local time (21:00 GMT) after undercover Israeli soldiers entered the Jenin refugee camp and the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm.

In Tubas, Israeli troops arrived via military helicopters and led the assault there, particularly in the Far'a refugee camp, according to Israeli and Palestinian media.

Large numbers of Israeli forces then raided the camps and besieged hospitals, preventing paramedics from reaching them, according to eyewitnesses and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

An ambulance officer from the city told Middle East Eye Israeli forces raided an ambulance station in the Far'a refugee camp and briefly held paramedics outside.

Adnan Ghoneimi said Israeli soldiers forced medical teams to leave the station and lined them up against a wall as they searched the facility.

Paramedics in the city had been blocked from reaching the camp since the raid began at midnight, he added.

A siege has been imposed on all the three cities - Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas - in the northern West Bank, cutting them off from the rest of the Palestinian territory.

Shatha Sabagh, a Jenin camp resident, described the raid as the largest she has seen in years.

"The number of military vehicles storming Jenin is very large," she told MEE.

"The three main hospitals are besieged and all the streets leading to the city are closed with dirt barriers. We have not witnessed an incursion this extensive for a long time, and it seems that it will continue for several days."

Israeli soldiers took position in several buildings in the city and deployed snipers on rooftops, shooting at anyone that moves in front of them, she added.

Meanwhile, the city has been paralysed, with workers and students forced to remain indoors. Residents have also not been able to bury those killed in the raid so far amid the tight siege imposed by the military, according to Sabagh.

Khaled Sobh from Far'a camp described a similar scene there.

"The situation in the camp is catastrophic and the incursion is the largest it has ever seen," he told MEE.

"Ambulances are prohibited from moving. The wounded were smuggled to hospitals because of all these closures."

According to Sobh, Israeli forces were "brutally" raiding home and using residents as human shields. He said at least one family was used as a cover for soldiers when they moved to the rooftop of their home to set up there.

Ghoneimi confirmed that an Israeli drone bombed the camp at dawn, killing four people.

Ambulance crews managed to reach the area hours later and were shocked by the strike's impact.  

In the Nur Shams camp near Tulkarm, eyewitness Bayan Mansour said soldiers began terrorising residents and besieging the two main hospitals as soon as they arrived after midnight.  

"The raid and the movement of vehicles and soldiers prove that they are preparing themselves to stay for a long period of time," Mansour told MEE.

"The clashes have not subsided and we hear the sounds of explosive devices exploding from time to time," she added.

A large number of military bulldozers were reported in all three cities, razing roads and destroying critical electricity and water infrastructure.

Largest raid since Second Intifada

The Israeli military said it was carrying out a large "counter-terror" operation in Jenin and Tulkarm without elaborating further.

Military sources told the Times of Israel that the attack was expected to last several days. Israel's Channel 12 said four battalions are involved in the offensive, including ground troops and the air force.

Meanwhile, the public broadcaster Kan News reported that the assault is the largest conducted by the Israeli military since the 2002 “Defensive Shield” attack at the height of the Second Intifada.

Shortly after the raid began, Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz called for the "temporary evacuation" of Palestinians from parts of the occupied West Bank. 

Katz said the military was working "intensively" in refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarm to "thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructures" he claims to exist there.

"We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents," Katz added.

"This is a war for everything and we must win it."

Meanwhile, Palestinian armed groups in the targeted cities, including the local chapters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, said their members were confronting the Israeli military, including detonating explosive devices against troops.

News outlet Israel Hayom described fighting in the camps between soldiers and Palestinians as "heavy and difficult".

The Tulkarm branch of the Islamic Jihad took responsibility for an attack on an Israeli military bulldozer using a roadside bomb.

Footage by local media showed Israeli forces evacuating a damaged bulldozer from the city.

The Islamic Jihad also claimed to have hit snipers in Tulkarm during an exchange of fire and said its fighters downed an Israeli drone.

There were no immediate reports of Israeli casualties.

Hospitals besieged

The Jenin Governmental Hospital, also known as the Khalil Suleiman Hospital, remains under Israeli siege almost 12 hours after the West Bank city was raided, the hospital's director told MEE.

Dr Wissam Abu Bakr said Israeli military vehicles surround the hospital, preventing people from entering and leaving freely.

“Ambulances that transported several casualties from the city were subjected to careful inspection as they attempted to enter the hospital, while soldiers searched the identity cards of some of those trapped in the hospital before allowing them to leave it after several hours,” Abu Bakr said.

Sniper units are also deployed in buildings adjacent to and overlooking the hospital, he added, restricting the movement of residents. 

In Far'a camp, Ghoneimi said due to the closure of roads leading to the camp, paramedics had been forced to take a bumpy road to transport the dead and wounded.

Some residents were forced to cut trees near their homes to allow ambulances to drive through the narrow alleyways. 

Whenever medical teams tried to reach the entrances to the camp, they were threatened by soldiers they would shoot them, Ghoneimi said.

“If we receive any call regarding emergency cases inside the camp, the paramedics try to deal with them on the field, and if they require transportation to the hospital, the ambulance tries to reach it via rugged dirt roads that take longer to pass.”

Ghoneimi told MEE the bombardment of the camp was the "most violent aerial bombardment" he had experienced.

“One of the martyrs was without a skull, shoulders or brain as if he had melted during the bombing," he said.

 

Israel Staging Largest Attack on West Bank in Decades

Edward Carver

Israeli forces on Wednesday conducted a series of deadly raids in the West Bank, killing at least 10 Palestinians in the largest assault on the occupied territory in over two decades.

In coordinated raids on four cities in the northern West Bank, Israel employed hundreds of ground troops as well as fighter aircraft, drones, and bulldozers.

Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, indicated that this was a planned escalation, saying the military was operating in “full force.”

He called for evacuations in the West Bank, as in Gaza, and “whatever steps are required,” explaining that “this is a war for everything and we must win it.”

The incursion follows a recent uptick in Israeli violence in the West Bank — five Palestinians, including two children, were killed in an airstrike there on Monday — and came on the same day that the United Nations Human Rights Office released a statement condemning it.

Humanitarian and pro-Palestinian voices denounced Wednesday’s offensive. Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Israeli-Arab member of the Knesset, called it the “Gazafication of all Palestinian land” and part of a plan to “ethnically cleanse the West Bank.”

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician and politician, told Democracy Now! that Israeli leaders, some of whom he named as “fascist,” are “trying to repeat the Nakba.”

“They are trying to repeat the same ethnic cleansing, the same genocide that is committed in Gaza,” he added.

Progressives in the U.S., Israel’s primary diplomatic ally and arms supplier, argued that Wednesday’s incursion was the direct result of American foreign policy choices.

“This is the predictable culmination of the actions of an Israeli regime that has been fully empowered, armed, supported, and encouraged by the Biden-Harris administration in its genocidal war,” Jeremy Scahill, a co-founder of The Intercept who recently formed a new investigative outlet called Drop Site News, wrote on social media.

“Israel has received the message from Biden and Harris loud and clear for almost 11 months: There is no scale of war crimes too great for the administration to take any meaningful steps to stop Israel’s mass slaughter operations,” Scahill added, referring to U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the Democratic presidential nominee.

Israeli raids on the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tubas, and Tulkarem began early Wednesday. Al Jazeera reported that it was the largest Israeli incursion into the West Bank since 2002.

The Israeli military said that the Palestinians who were killed in the West Bank were “armed terrorists who posed a threat to security forces.” Israeli media reports indicated that the raids are expected to continue for several days.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a statement relayed to Al Jazeera on Wednesday that Israeli forces had disrupted medical and emergency services at several locations in the West Bank. Israeli forces stormed the Al-Far’a refugee camp, detained the PRCS team there, and cut off their communications, according to PRCS.

Israel has occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza since 1967. The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion last month declaring the occupation of these Palestinian territories unlawful, saying it must end “as rapidly as possible.”

Most of the world’s nations have long declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law, a position that Israel disputes. Settler violence has increased markedly since Oct. 7 under cover of the even greater carnage in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.

Hamas and allied militant groups killed more than 1,100 Israelis in a brutal massacre on Oct. 7.

In the West Bank, where nightly raids have become commonplace, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 646 people over the last 11 months, including 148 children, according to Palestinian health officials.

In addition to the military raid that killed five on Monday, an Israeli settler or reservist attack in Wadi Rahal village reportedly led to a Palestinian man being shot in the back, according to the United Nations’ news service.

Omar Baddar, a Middle East political analyst, argued that Wednesday’s incursion was part of a longstanding Israeli plan.

“I think the context of it is worth noting, which is the fact that Israel has been intending to annex and ethnically cleanse huge parts of the West Bank for a very, very long time,” Baddar told Al Jazeera.

In its condemnation of Israeli aggression in the West Bank, the U.N. Human Rights Office wrote that the situation “could worsen dramatically if [Israeli security forces] continue to systematically use unlawful lethal force and ignore violence perpetrated by settlers.”

The agency warned of “extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings and destruction of Palestinian homes and infrastructure,” and said that the settler violence was made possible by political support from Israel’s leadership.

“The U.N. Human Rights Office has reported for years on settlers attacking Palestinian communities in their land in the West Bank with impunity,” the statement says.

“This longstanding trend has dramatically escalated since October 7, as the settler movement, with political backing at the highest levels of Israeli government, has seized the opportunity to escalate attacks against Palestinians, forcing them to leave their lands, and expand settlements and Israel’s control over the West Bank.”

The assault on the West Bank has not stopped Israel from continuing its assault on Gaza. Israeli forces killed eight Gazans in a strike on a school-turned-shelter in eastern Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera reported.