JENIN (Dispatches) – An Israeli raid on the West Bank city of Jenin stretched into a second day on Wednesday, an AFP correspondent reported, after eight Palestinians were killed the previous day.
Explosions and gunfire were heard from inside the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, the AFP correspondent said.
The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said Zionist troops had killed eight people and wounded nearly 20 during the raid, which began on Tuesday morning.
An AFP correspondent saw four bodies at Jenin’s Khalil Suleiman government hospital morgue.
The Israeli army said Wednesday that troops had “exchanged fire with armed men” and killed a number of Palestinians.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa and medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported that surgeon Usaeed Jabareen, from the government hospital, was among those killed.
A schoolteacher and a student were also among the dead, Wafa reported, quoting hospital director Wissam Bakr.
The Israeli army said it had raided the house of Palestinian fighter Ahmed Barakat.
The streets near the entrance to the camp were deserted on Wednesday afternoon, with drones buzzing overhead.
On the outskirts of the city, a group of Israeli armored vehicles were parked near a roundabout, while farm workers picked vegetables across the road.
Palestinian resistance group Hamas called the raid a “massacre” and deemed it “conclusive evidence of the criminal mentality that rules the occupying regime and its ideological belief in killing our people”.
The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas condemned the raid, saying in a statement on Wafa that Israel was “killing innocent people, doctors, and destroying the infrastructure of Palestinian hospitals, cities and villages”.
The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has seen a surge in violence for more than a year, but particularly since the genocidal campaign that erupted on October 7.
At least 513 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Zionist troops or settlers since the Gaza war broke out, according to Palestinian officials.
Retaliatory attacks by Palestinians have killed at least 12 Israelis in the West Bank over the same period, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
The Gaza Strip has been gripped by more than seven months of war since October 7.