RAMALLAH (Dispatches) -- Israel’s minister of war announced on Wednesday that Zionist forces will remain in the Jenin refugee camp in occupied West Bank and in Syrian territory that it recently seized bordering the occupied Golan Heights.
Speaking from the camp, Israel Katz warned that the “Jenin refugee camp will not return to what it was” after the army’s invasion of the city, dubbed Operation Iron Wall, concludes. 
On January 21, the Israeli military bombed and stormed Jenin as it launched a major onslaught on the northern West Bank city, days after a ceasefire in Gaza went into effect. 
At least 17 Palestinians have since been martyred and 50 wounded by Israeli fire, according to Palestinian media. The Israeli army has also demolished roughly 60 Palestinian homes in the camp.
The Israeli army announced the ground invasion, which is now on its ninth day, in a joint statement with Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency.
Standing alongside the commander of the central command, Avi Balut, the brigadier general of the Israeli division in the West Bank, Yaki Dolf, and commander of the Menashe Brigade, Ayub Kayuf, Katz stressed that the onslaught would expand to other camps in the occupied territory. 
The minister’s office claimed “huge quantities” of weapons were seized in Palestinian homes, comparing it to those the Israeli army had said it found in Gaza, Israeli news outlet Ynet reported.
Katz “declared war” on armed activities in the West Bank and warned the Palestinian Authority (PA) to start taking that fight more “seriously”.
Weeks before the Israeli raid on Jenin, the Palestinian Authority had launched a large-scale assault on Jenin, which involved besieging the city, shooting at unarmed civilians and clashing with local fighters. 
PA forces killed several Palestinians and wounded many more for over a month before Israel’s invasion began.
In the besieged Gaza Strip, the bodies of 63 martyrs were taken to Gaza hospitals over the past 24 hours, in addition to eight people who were wounded, the ministry of health said.
The ministry explained that 59 of the bodies were of martyrs retrieved from under the rubble of destroyed buildings. Two had succumbed to serious wounds and two were martyred in separate incidents, said the Palestinian Information Centre.
It added that the number of martyrs in Gaza since the Israeli genocide war was launched on October 7, 2023 has thus reached 47,417, with the number of those wounded reaching 111,571.
An unspecified number of casualties are still under the rubble of destroyed homes and other civilian infrastructure.
Katz on Tuesday also announced that Israeli troops will “indefinitely” be stationed in Syria’s Jabal al-Sheikh. 
The war minister made the statement during a visit to Zionist posts on the summit of the mountain alongside the commander of the 210th division, brigadier general Yair Palai, and the commander of the 810th Mountain Brigade, colonel Liron Appleman.
Katz proclaimed that the troops will remain deployed in the buffer zone, which was established in a 1974 agreement.
The minister said that the purpose of his trip was to guarantee the Israeli army was prepared “for both defense and offence”. 
“We will not return to the reality of October 7, and we will not rely on others for our defense - here or anywhere else. We only rely on