Qassam Muaddi
Israeli
forces killed two brothers and injured more than 30 in a large-scale military
invasion in Nablus. According to witnesses, one brother was killed in a
confrontation with soldiers after they ordered him to pull his pants down and
he refused.
A view of Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces
in the Tulkarm refugee camp, east of Tulkarm city, in the northern West
Bank, on June 9, 2025. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA Images)
Israeli forces killed two
Palestinian brothers and injured more than 30 others in a military raid in the
West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday, which lasted for 28 hours. The two
brothers were identified as Nidal and Khaled Amira, ages 35 and 40, respectively.
The Palestinian Red Crescent
Society said in a statement that its teams gave first aid to more than 80
Palestinians during the Israeli raid, 55 of whom suffered choking by breathing
tear gas, and the rest were injured by gunfire. Israeli forces withdrew from
Nablus early on Wednesday, after causing extensive damage in the city’s old
town, according to the Nablus governorate.
Palestinian media reported that
the Israeli raid targeted the old city of Nablus, where they broke into houses,
blew out doors, and took over several rooftops while they arrested a number of
Palestinians.
The Israeli raid started after
midnight on Monday, with the Israeli army pushing more than 40 armored vehicles
into Nablus, marking one of the largest raids into Nablus in years. Israeli
Channel 12 reported that the Israeli army was conducting a “precise and
concentrated” operation in Nablus’s ‘Qasba’ district, which includes the
historical old city. Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 14 reported that the Israeli
army had killed “two terrorists” in Nablus after one tried to take the weapon
of one of the soldiers.
Palestinian social media accounts
circulated video footage from Nablus, showing a man walking toward Israeli
soldiers in one of the alleys entering the Qasba from the city center square.
The man is seen with his hands raised until he raises his shirt upon the order
of a soldier. The footage then shows one soldier kicking the man, before the
man and the soldiers enter in direct physical contact, and the camera moves to
make the footage unclear, while gunfire shots are heard.
A Palestinian journalist
reporting for Al-Araby TV, Ameed Shehadeh, who was present at the incident,
told Mondoweiss that the man in the video was one of the brothers, and “he was
entering the alley because his family was trapped in the old city. He was asking
to be allowed to bring them out. One of the soldiers ordered him to raise his
shirt, which he did, and then they ordered him to pull down his pants, which he
refused to do, and then the Israeli soldier kicked him, and both began to
wrestle.”
“As they were wrestling, the
man’s brother entered the alley asking the soldiers to leave his brother
alone,” explained Shehadeh. “ He began to try to pull his brother away from the
soldiers who were grabbing him, and in the middle of that, one soldier’s rifle
fired, and then soldiers became hysterical,” he said. “The first brother
managed to get away, and as he ran, the soldiers shot at him and killed him.
Meanwhile, the second brother, who had gone in to try to save his brother, had
been neutralized by the soldiers, with one soldier literally sitting on him,
when another soldier approached and shot him twice, killing him.”
During the raid, Israeli forces
blocked entrances to Nablus, disrupting circulation in and out of the city for
the whole day. On Wednesday, the governor of Nablus, Ghassan Daghlas, toured
the historic district of the city, stating that Israeli forces had “targeted
the heart of Nablus, and its commercial, cultural and touristic center,
conducting field interrogations with 250 families.” The governor also added
that the Palestinian Authority will “rebuild what the Israeli aggression
destroyed.”
Additionally, on Wednesday,
Israeli special forces killed a Palestinian man in his sixties in the town of
Tammoun, near Tubas, in the northeast part of the West Bank. The man was
identified as Raeq Bisharat, whom the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – PIJ mourned
in a statement as one of its leading members.
It is not the first time that
Israeli forces have conducted extensive raids in Nablus. In fact, Nablus’s old
city has been a focus of Israeli raids since 2022, as local resistance groups,
including the well known group that came to be known as ‘the Lions’ Den,’
emerged in the alleys of the Qasba. However, due to the intense Israeli
crackdown, with support from the Palestinian Authority, armed Palestinian
resistance in Nablus had declined significantly before the beginning of the
current Israeli war on Gaza.
In August of last year, Israel
launched a large-scale offensive in the northern West Bank, dubbed ‘Operation
Summer Camps’, attacking the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams
with large forces. Israel later launched a second large-scale offensive in the
West Bank, last January, after reaching a ceasefire deal in Gaza with Hamas.
That offensive dubbed ‘Operation Iron Wall’ included a wholesale destruction of
civilian infrastructure in the same refugee camps, Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur
Shams, and expanded to the refugee camp of al-Faraa and into some neighborhoods
of the cities of Tulkarem and Jenin.
This ongoing Israeli military
offensive in the West Bank has so far expelled more than 40,000 Palestinians
from their homes in Tulkarem and Jenin, completely depopulating the cities’
refugee camps. This campaign has destroyed more than 2,000 homes and turned the
camps into permanent stations for Israeli troops.
Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’ offensive
hasn’t officially ended, and although it hasn’t officially expanded to include
Nablus yet, Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, has stated that the
offensive will eventually expand to the rest of the West Bank. For Palestinians,
this means that every large raid into a West Bank city could be the beginning
of the same scenario that has played out in Jenin and Tulkarem. This is
especially true in Nablus, which has already been a main target of Israeli
military raids following Jenin and Tulkarem.
Since last January, Israel has
tightened its military control on the West Bank, imposing new checkpoints and
iron gates at the entrances of Palestinian towns to restrict Palestinian
movement and appropriated large swaths of Palestinian land in order to expand
illegal Israeli settlements. This combination of moves, along with the
escalation of military campaigns like that seen in Nablus, all point to
Israel’s broader stated goal of annexing the West Bank and preventing any
Palestinian political entity from having the basis for statehood. These
policies have also been accompanied by mass arrest campaigns and an increase in
settler violence against Palestinian rural communities throughout the occupied
West Bank.
Since October 2023, at least
1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West
Bank, some 10,000 have been arrested, and between 40,000 and 50,000 have been
displaced from their homes.
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