JENIN: Israel continued biggest military operation for years in the occupied West Bank for a second day on Tuesday, leaving at least 10 Palestinians dead and forcing thousands to flee their homes
The raid, launched under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government, targeted the northern city of Jenin and employed armoured vehicles, army bulldozers and drone strikes.
On Tuesday morning, shops were shuttered in Jenin, with very few people on the streets littered with debris and burned roadblocks from the previous day’s fighting.
In the city’s refugee camp, multiple streets were ripped up leaving broken electricity cables, oil, and pools of water apparently after an Israeli anti-bomb bulldozer passed.
Prior to this operation Israel had already stepped up raids in the northern West Bank. Israeli-Palestinian violence has worsened since last year, and escalated further under the Netanyahu coalition government. The Palestinian health ministry said a total of 10 people were killed and 100 others wounded, 20 of them seriously.
Since the start of the operation about 3,000 people had fled their homes in the Jenin refugee camp, deputy governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Roub said, adding arrangements were being made to house them in schools and other shelters in Jenin city.
The United Nations says Jenin camp has “one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty” among West Bank camps, and the military operation disrupted water and electricity to “large areas” of it.
The Palestinian foreign ministry called the escalation “an open war against the people of Jenin”. The Jenin area is nominally controlled by President Mahmud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.
The ruling Fatah party declared a general strike affecting private businesses and other sectors, and which saw all Palestinian Authority employees remaining home.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is “deeply concerned” about the violence, and called for the respect of international humanitarian law, a spokesman said in a statement.
Neighbouring Jordan raised similar concerns and the United Arab Emirates urged “the immediate halt of repeated and escalating campaigns against the Palestinian people”.
The Arab League was to hold an emergency meeting Tuesday to discuss “an Arab mobilisation to counter the Israeli attack on Jenin”.
