Palestinians cut security ties with Israel over deadly raid

Images in Palestinian media showed the charred exterior of a two-story building and debris on the street. The military said it entered the building in order to detonate explosives it said were being used by the suspects.

After troops withdrew from the area following the three-hour operation, several cars were overturned, their windshields and windows shattered, as residents inspected the damage.

Palestinian Health Minister May Al-Kaila said paramedics struggled to reach the wounded during the fighting, while Akram Rajoub, the governor of Jenin, said the military prevented emergency workers from evacuating the wounded.

Both officials accused the military of firing tear gas at the pediatric ward of a hospital, causing children to choke. Video from the hospital showed women carrying children into a hospital corridor.

The military said forces closed roads to facilitate their operation, which may have complicated the efforts of rescue teams, and that tear gas had likely wafted into the hospital from the clashes nearby.

The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the 61-year-old woman killed as Magda Obaid, and the Israeli military said it was looking into reports of her death. Health officials identified the eight other dead as men ranging in age from 18 to 40. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade — an armed militia affiliated with Fatah, the secular political party that controls the Palestinian Authority — claimed one of the dead, Izz al-Din Salahat, as a fighter. The ministry said at least 20 people were wounded.

According to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, May 14, 2021, was the deadliest day in the West Bank since 2002. Thirteen Palestinians were killed that day in various confrontations. But Thursday marked the single bloodiest incursion since 2002, during an intense wave of violence known as the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which left scars still visible in Jenin. Israel launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp, leveling hundreds of buildings in response to a string of suicide bombings.

Palestinians in the refugee camp dug a mass grave for the dead and Abbas declared three days of mourning, ordering flags to fly at half-staff.

“We ask that the international community help the Palestinians against this extremist right-wing government and protect our citizens,” said Rajoub, the Jenin governor.

U.N. Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland said he was “deeply alarmed and saddened” by the violence and urged calm. Condemnations came from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Turkey, which recently reestablished full diplomatic ties with Israel, as well as from neighboring Jordan and Hamas.

Tensions over violence in the West Bank have spilled into Gaza in the past.

“The response of the resistance to what happened today in Jenin camp will not be delayed,” warned top Hamas official Saleh Arouri.

The Islamic Jihad branch in the coastal enclave has repeatedly fought against Israel, most recently in a fierce three-day clash last summer that killed dozens of Palestinians and disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem last year, making 2022 the deadliest in those territories since 2004, according to B’Tselem. So far this year, 30 Palestinians have been killed.

Israel says most of the dead were militants. But youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in the confrontations also have been killed. So far this year, not including Thursday, one-third of the Palestinians killed by Israeli troops or civilians had ties to armed groups.

Last year, 30 people were killed in Palestinian attacks against Israelis.

Israel says its raids are meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart attacks. The Palestinians say they further entrench Israel’s 55-year, open-ended occupation of the West Bank, which Israel captured along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians claim those territories for their hoped-for state.

Israel's new far-right government, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and propped up by ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, has pledged to put West Bank settlement expansion at the top of its priority list and has already announced punitive steps against the Palestinians for pushing the U.N.’s highest judicial body to give its opinion on the Israeli occupation.

Israel has already established dozens of settlements in the West Bank, which are now home to some 500,000 people.

The Palestinians and much of the international community view settlements as illegal and an obstacle to peace, even as negotiations to end the conflict have been moribund for more than a decade.

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By MAJDI MOHAMMED and TIA GOLDENBERG Associated Press

Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press writers Areej Hazboun and Isabel DeBre in Jerusalem, Jon Gambrell in Dubai and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed.

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