Four killed as Israel’s large-scale assault on West Bank enters third week

Israeli forces have killed at least four Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to media reports, as Israel’s biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory since the early 2000s entered its third week.

The Palestinian Wafa news agency said that three people were killed in a drone attack on a vehicle in the city of Tulkarem on Wednesday evening while another was killed by an Israeli sniper in the Far’a refugee camp, near the city of Tubas.

The Israeli drone attack on Tulkarem set fire to the vehicle as well as a nearby home, Wafa reported.

And in Far’a, the Israeli sniper killed 46-year-old Sufyan Jawad Fayez Abdul Jawad after shooting him in the heart, the agency said.

There was no immediate comment from Israel.

The killings took the overall death toll from Israel’s large-scale militarised operation, launched in the West Bank on August 28, to at least 50. The figure included five people who were killed in an air attack on Tubas early on Wednesday.

Arrests

About 40 people were arrested throughout the West Bank since Wednesday night, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.

One of those detained was pulled from a hospital where he was being treated, the group said on Thursday.

The total number of Palestinians arrested since October 7 has reached 10,700, it added.

Israel’s offensive, which the military claims targets Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank, came as it continues to bombard the Gaza Strip, killing more than 41,000 Palestinians since October 7.

The West Bank operation is mostly concentrated in the territory’s northern governorates of Tulkarem, Tubas and Jenin, and has displaced hundreds of people and inflicted widespread damage to roads, water and sewerage networks, according to the United Nations.

In the Jenin governorate, from where Israeli forces withdrew last week after a 10-day operation that saw the use of “lethal, war-like tactics”, at least 21 Palestinians have been killed and dozens more wounded, according to Wafa and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

In its latest update on the situation in the West Bank, OCHA said Israel’s operation in Jenin displaced 1,000 families. Most of them have returned to their homes, but at least 297 people, including 102 children, remain displaced after Israeli forces rendered their homes inhabitable.

Israeli forces also bulldozed 70 percent of Jenin city’s roads and the underlying water and sewage networks, “severely impacting the safety of movement and access to essential services of water, sanitation, healthcare, education, and markets”, OCHA reported.

As a result of the destruction, water supply has been cut to approximately 35,000 residents of the camp and its surrounding neighbourhoods since August 28, it said.

The Israel-wrought destruction was similar in the Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps in the Tulkarem governorate, where at least 12 people have been killed.

OCHA said about 327 Palestinians, including 123 children, remain displaced in the two camps after Israeli forces damaged 400 homes and rendered 61 of them uninhabitable.

More than 2.6km (1.6 miles) of water and sewage networks in the camps have also been bulldozed, cutting off water to approximately 33,000 people in the camps and resulting in sewage overflows, the agency added.