JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank –
Israel’s army carried out an arrest raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank and killed two Palestinians in gun battles on Friday, according to Palestinian reports.
Later on Friday, troops killed a Palestinian who carried out a shooting attack near a settlement, wounding an Israeli civilian, the army said.
It was the latest bloodshed in what has become the deadliest year in the territory since 2015.
Palestinian militant groups claimed the two men killed in the Jenin refugee camp as members, though there were conflicting statements about the circumstances surrounding the death of one of them, a hospital doctor.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said Dr. Abdullah al-Ahmed was on duty, tending to the wounded outside his hospital when he was shot.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed branch of the secular Fatah party, claimed to be a member. In a poster announcing his death, the group said he was killed “in an armed confrontation” with Israeli forces “defending the homeland.” The poster showed him posing with two assault rifles.
The second man killed in Jenin on Friday was identified by the Islamic Jihad militant group as a camp commander. The camp is a stronghold of Islamic Jihad, a rival of Fatah, and has been a frequent focus of clashes.
Five people were injured in the fighting, including two paramedics, when an ambulance was caught in the crossfire, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported. The video showed an ambulance trapped in a narrow alley in the camp trying to retrieve a body as gunshots rang out.
The Israeli army said it entered Jenin on Friday to arrest a wanted Hamas militant who had carried out recent attacks against Israeli security forces. Diaa Muhammad Yusef Salama, 24, was armed with an M-16 assault rifle when Israeli security forces detained him and two other suspects, it added.
The raid triggered a shootout between soldiers and armed Palestinians. The photos showed smoke rising from the camp after the militants apparently detonated explosives. The army said it opened fire on the gunmen and warned uninvolved residents that they were risking their lives by being in the area.
At one point, a gunfight broke out outside the local hospital, witnesses said. The doctor working in the licensing department was shot in the head as he was leaving the building to tend to an injured man in the hospital courtyard, hospital director Wisam Bakr said, adding that he knew nothing about the reports of that al-Ahmed belonged to a militant group.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned Friday’s shootings as “extrajudicial executions.”
“The Israeli government has crossed all the red lines,” he said.
On Friday night, the Israeli army said it killed a Palestinian attacker who opened fire and wounded a civilian near the Israeli settlement of Beit El, outside the Palestinian city of Ramallah. He said a search for more suspects was underway.
Also on Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian homes in the northern West Bank village of Hawara, the Wafa agency reported. Videos posted online showed settlers from a nearby Jewish settlement throwing stones at a house in the town.
Other videos showed Israeli soldiers fighting with Palestinians trying to protect settlers’ homes.
Palestinian medics said 66 people were wounded in clashes with Israeli forces, two of them with live bullets. Most suffered from breathing difficulties due to tear gas.
A day earlier, settlers from the nearby Yitzhar settlement razed the town.
More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli-Palestinian clashes in the West Bank and east Jerusalem this year, making 2022 the deadliest year since 2015. Clashes have escalated since a series of Palestinian attacks in the spring killed to 19 people in Israel.
Israel says most of the Palestinians killed have been militants. But young people who were throwing stones in protest at the incursions and others who did not participate in the clashes have also been killed.
Israel says the raids are necessary to dismantle militant networks at a time when Palestinian security forces are unable or unwilling to do so.
Palestinians say the raids undermine their security forces and are aimed at cementing Israel’s 55-year indefinite occupation of land they want for their hoped-for state. Hundreds of Palestinians have been rounded up in such raids, many of them placed in so-called administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold them without trial or charge.
Tensions spilled over into East Jerusalem this week, as Israeli police fired live ammunition, tear gas and stun grenades at Palestinians who were throwing stones and fireworks in several disputed neighborhoods of the city. Two Israelis were injured in the clashes, Israeli police said on Friday, adding that security forces have arrested 18 suspects accused of disturbing public order.
Police said they increased their presence in critical areas across the city.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war, along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians seek these territories for their long-awaited independent state.