WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Zionist troops have stormed several mosques in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on the first Friday of the fasting month of Ramadan.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the forces raided six mosques in the Old City of Nablus at dawn on Friday, preventing the prayer from being held and detaining three Palestinians during their incursion into the city.
Citing local sources, the news agency reported that the Israeli military fired live ammunition, stun grenades and toxic gas canisters as the forces stormed multiple neighborhoods in the city and its Old City.
“During the incursion, the occupation forces stormed and searched several mosques, including al-Satoon Mosque, Ajaj Mosque, the Great Salah al-Din Mosque, al-Tina Mosque, al-Nasr Mosque, and al-Beik Mosque,” Wafa said. “These mosques, all located in the Old City, were ransacked during the raids.”
Palestine’s Safa news agency also confirmed the report and said the occupation set fire to a room inside al-Nasr Mosque.
Zionist troops set fire to Al-Nasr Mosque in Nablus, West Bank.
The news agency added that the Israeli forces had earlier raided several homes in Nablus, causing destruction and chaos before detaining three citizens from different parts of the city.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Thursday that Israel’s ongoing violent aggression against the West Bank appears to be part of the regime’s plan to annex the occupied territory.
Israel’s military onslaught on the West Bank started shortly after the Gaza truce took effect in January and ended the occupying regime’s 15-month genocide in the besieged Palestinian territory. 
Since the onset of the Gaza war in October 2023, attacks by the Israeli army and illegal settlers have killed at least 930 Palestinians and injured nearly 7,000 in the occupied West Bank.
It initially focused on Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps, but has since expanded to more areas of the West Bank’s north.
Last July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that the Zionist regime’s long-standing occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal, demanding the evacuation of all illegal settlements in the West Bank and East al-Quds.
Israel launched its brutal aggression against Gaza after Hamas-led resistance groups carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime failed to achieve its declared objectives of freeing captives and eliminating Hamas despite killing at least 48,446 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza.
Meanwhile, a UN official told AFP a major aggression by the Zionist regime which over several weeks has displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians and ravaged refugee camps increasingly appears to be aligned with the “vision of annexation” of the West Bank.
Zionist troops carry out regular raids targeting militants in the West Bank, occupied since 1967, but the ongoing attacks since late January is already the longest in two decades, with dire effects on Palestinians.
“There are growing concerns that the reality being created on the ground aligns with the vision of annexation of the West Bank,” said Roland Friedrich, director of West Bank affairs for UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees.
“It’s an unprecedented situation, both from a humanitarian and wider political perspective,” he said.
“We talk about 40,000 people that have been forcibly displaced from their homes” in the northern West Bank, mainly from three refugee camps where the operation had begun, said Friedrich.
“These camps are now largely empty,” their residents unable to return and struggling to find shelter elsewhere, he said.
Inside the camps, the level of destruction to “electricity, sewage and water, but also private houses” was “very concerning”, Friedrich added.