Amid clashes in several neighborhoods in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces arrested at least 20 Palestinians and killed one person on Thursday, according to local media and a prominent Palestinian human rights group.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club, a non-governmental human rights group, said in a statement that Israeli forces made the arrests in Nur Shams, a neighborhood near the town of Tulkarem. He said Israeli forces had moved more than 100 Palestinians to another area and interrogated about 500 people, including women and children.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli army spokesman, said the operation in Nur Shams lasted more than 40 hours and “destroyed many explosives and detained dozens of terror suspects.”
Wafa Awwad, a journalist with the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, was among those arrested, her outlet and the Palestinian Prisoners Club said. Palestinian media reported raids in Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus and Jenin, among other places in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry reported that Asid Jawad Bani Odeh, 29, was shot in the chest and killed during a raid by Israeli forces in Tamun, a village in the northern West Bank.
Photos from Nur Shams and Sir, a village near Jenin, showed residents of both sites assessing damage from Thursday’s clashes. They inspected charred and ruined buildings, and bullet-riddled windows and walls.
Although the war between Israel and Hamas has been focused on the Gaza Strip since it began almost three months ago, violence has also increased in the West Bank. The Israeli military has carried out frequent raids in the West Bank, some of them deadly, and made thousands of arrests. Violence between Palestinians and Israeli civilians in the area has increased.
During a visit to the West Bank on Thursday, Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, said the Israeli military would fight terrorism wherever it finds it.
“We continue to focus on eliminating the threat posed by Hamas, but we do not forget that our goal is to eliminate terrorist threats from all our borders,” he said, according to Israel’s N12 news channel.
He added that the protection of Israeli settlements was a “central issue” and that Israeli military forces have expanded their presence in the area.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, are considered illegal by the United States and many other countries around the world. The United Nations and many Palestinians see the territory as part of a future Palestinian state, which settlements have made increasingly less sustainable.
After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government came to power a year ago, it approved permits for 13,000 new housing units and has pushed to expand settlements in the West Bank.
Settler violence against Palestinians was on the rise before the war and has increased dramatically since October 7, when Hamas launched its attack on Israel. The Palestinian Health Ministry has said 313 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7 in clashes with Israeli troops and armed extremist settlers.
On Wednesday, Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, condemned the attacks on the West Bank on social media and warned that “everyone will pay the price” for failing to curb extremism.
“Burning the West Bank and Lebanon is the goal of the extremist agenda of the Israeli government, which continues to destroy Gaza to prolong its political leadership and drag the West into a regional war,” he said.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club has said the arrests in the West Bank have raised the number of Palestinians in Israeli jails to its highest level in 14 years. Many of those arrested are being held without charge or trial.
Talya Minsberg and Abu Bakr Bashir translation provided.
