February 05, 2023 04:04 am | Update 04:04 am IST – Akbat Jaber Refugee Camp, West Bank
Palestinians examine damage to a house destroyed by Israeli troops during a military raid in Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on February 4, 2023. Photo Credit: Reuters
Israeli forces raided a refugee camp near the Palestinian city of Jericho on 4 February, surrounding houses it said were being used as hideouts for Palestinian attackers and setting ablaze residents. But were shooting. The fighting wounded six Palestinians, two seriously, the Palestinian health ministry said, and shocked the usually quiet oasis city, which has seen less violence than other West Bank cities.
The army said it entered the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, southwest of Jericho, to search for suspects involved in a shooting attack last week in the nearby Israeli settlement.
Last Saturday, the West Bank was on edge after the deadliest Israeli military assault in two decades and two subsequent Palestinian assaults in East Jerusalem that killed seven people, the army said, after a Palestinian gunman opened fire in a settlement near Jericho. The restaurant was set on fire. The army said the gunman fled from the spot after firing one shot. No one was injured.
The army said that many Palestinians, with the help of family members, were hiding in their homes after the shootings and planning future attacks.
To force the fugitives to surrender, a military bulldozer rammed the walls of one of the houses as an Israeli commander made threats over a loudspeaker. Camp residents reported receiving text messages urging families to keep their children inside and avoid confrontations with Israeli soldiers.
The army said the suspect and family members left a house and barricaded themselves inside. Security forces had leveled most of the house, leaving a pile of rubble and bent metal. Palestinian protesters threw stones and Molotov cocktails at military jeeps as they drove down the streets of the camp, while some gunmen opened fire. The Palestinian Health Ministry said that Israeli forces retaliated, injuring six, none seriously.
The incursion comes as violence escalates in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank under Israel’s new far-right government, which has taken a belligerent stance against the Palestinians. Israel captured the West Bank along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War. The Palestinians want those territories as their hope for an independent state.
The Israeli army has carried out near-nightly raids in the occupied West Bank since a series of deadly Palestinian attacks inside Israel last spring. During the escalating raids over the last year and a half, Jericho remained a sort of sleepy desert city, spared most of the violence.
Since last week’s shooting in a nearby settlement, the Israeli army has blocked access to several roads in Jericho – a closure that has put the city under a semi-blockade, disrupting business and forcing hours-long shutdowns at checkpoints. have created roadblocks that have also affected Palestinian security forces, the footage showed.
The Palestinian Authority announced a halt to security coordination with Israel, in retaliation for last week’s raid on the Jenin refugee camp that killed 10 Palestinians.
About 150 Palestinians were executed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem last year, according to figures from the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, the deadliest in those areas since 2004. About 30 people were killed in Israel by Palestinians in 2022.
The Israeli army says most of those killed are Palestinian extremists. But stone-pelting youths and others who were not involved in the clash have also been killed while opposing the intrusion.
On Saturday evening, the Israeli army said air defense shot down a drone launched from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in the south of the country. No Palestinian group has said it was behind the drone launch, which set off warning sirens on the Israeli side of the border.
Escalating violence in the West Bank has cast a shadow over the Gaza-Israel borders after months of calm, with several rocket launches and airstrikes in recent days.