TULKARM, West Bank — A major Israeli military incursion in the northern West Bank stretched into a second day on Thursday, as troops battled militants in cities and refugee camps, trapping civilians, destroying roads and infrastructure and raising the operation’s death toll to at least 16, according to Israeli authorities and Palestinian health officials.
Around Tulkarm and Jenin, where the raids were concentrated, residents said they were stuck at home or in mosques and hospitals as clashes erupted and Israeli military vehicles blocked the roads. Others were detained by soldiers and later released, they said, but were unable to get home. In some places, basic services such as water, power, internet and cellular service shut down amid the fighting.
Israel launched the operation overnight Tuesday into Wednesday with hundreds of troops backed by combat aircraft, and said the goal was to dismantle “terrorist infrastructure” used by militant groups to stage attacks on Israelis. The Israel Defense Forces, Israel Border Police and Shin Bet internal security service targeted three locations on the first day — Tulkarm, Jenin and the al-Fara’a refugee camp — all in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
It is the most significant operation in the Palestinian territory since the Oct. 7 attacks, which was carried out by Hamas-led fighters from the Gaza Strip. Israel responded both by going to war in Gaza and clamping down in the West Bank, where roughly 3 million Palestinians and more than 500,000 Jewish settlers live.
Militancy here was already on the rise as Israel expanded its hold on the territory — but successive Israeli military operations since Oct. 7 have helped push more men to take up arms, Palestinian residents say.
The IDF said Thursday that it had completed its operation in the area around Fara’a, about 15 miles south of Jenin and near the city of Tubas, and residents said they were taking stock of the destruction and burying the dead.
At least 16 people have been killed so far in the raids, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the West Bank. Death announcements by militant groups suggest the majority of the dead are fighters.
The IDF said military and security officers had killed 16 “terrorists” during the first two days of the raids.
But street battles continued in the Jenin and Tulkarm regions, where the Israeli military said it killed prominent Palestinian militant commander Mohamed Jaber, also known as Abu Shuja’a, early Thursday.
Jaber, 26, commanded the Tulkarm Battalion, an umbrella group led by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was killed inside a mosque along with four other militants after “exchanges of fire,” the military said, which accused him of planning and executing attacks, including a shooting that killed an Israeli civilian, Amnon Muchtar, in the West Bank city of Qalqilya in June.
He was “just a normal Palestinian guy smoking shisha” until a few years ago, said Saif Aqel, a youth leader associated with Fatah, the dominant party of the Palestinian Authority. “The environment he was living in made him like this,” he said of Jaber, pointing to the increasingly deadly raids by Israeli forces over the past few years.
At least 622 Palestinians and 15 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank since October, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.
In Jenin, Israeli forces blocked off roads leading both to the main public hospital and the private medical facility, Ibn Sina, hampering the work of doctors and paramedics, according to Jenin governor Kamal Abu al-Rub. Internet and phone service was also cut off there on Thursday because of damage to infrastructure sustained during the raid, the main Palestinian network provider, Jawwal, said.
Ashraf Jaradat, 42, lives just inside the entrance to the Jenin refugee camp. He said Thursday that he and his wife and their four children were trapped in the house without internet or water, unable to leave because Israeli snipers were stationed nearby. “The children feel very afraid” and are hungry, he said. “The situation is very, very bad.”
In the streets of Tulkarm, southwest of Jenin and just outside the Nur Shams refugee camp, where clashes were underway Thursday, a cluster of medics and ambulance drivers with the Palestine Red Crescent Society waited along a main road largely plowed to rubble by Israeli bulldozers scraping for explosive devices.
They described scenes of devastation inside the camp. “The situation is catastrophic,” said Ahmad Zahran, deputy director of Tulkarm’s Red Crescent chapter, who had just returned from evacuating a man with shrapnel wounds.
“Whole neighborhoods are destroyed,” he said. “Houses, shops, the infrastructure.”
Zahran said Tulkarm’s Red Crescent chapter had evacuated 32 civilians since the raid began, most of them children. As he waited, he took a call on his radio about one case: a 65-year-old disabled man whose family found him dead in his bedroom of an apparent gunshot from the outside.
The family sent photographs to the Red Crescent, but Zahran said: “So far, [Israeli forces] have not let us come in to get him,” he said.
Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said security forces in the field were working to “quickly respond to deal with reports of any damage to civilian infrastructure around the clock” and that there were also coordinated entries and exits of ambulances as required. He said Israel was not blocking the hospitals but ensuring “terrorists are not getting into hospitals, and the ambulances can go in and out.”
A group of Nur Shams residents who had been arrested and released were sheltering at a mosque a few hundred yards from the camp boundary on Thursday. Sleeping bags and water bottles lined the walls during midday prayers.
Mahmoud Qarawi said he and his two brothers had been hunkering down in their family compound at the center of the camp Wednesday afternoon, without water or electricity, when an explosion rocked the house. Something had blown a hole in the wall.
As a drone sounded overhead, the brothers went to the front gate intending to surrender. Outside, on a street plowed to rubble, soldiers told them to go back inside and exit slowly through the blast hole, said Qarawi, 34.
The three were cuffed with plastic zip ties while soldiers used electronic tablets to check their IDs. Then they were blindfolded and put in an army vehicle, Qarawi said. They were taken to an IDF outpost within the camp and told to kneel on the floor with their heads down. For several hours, they were asked about their names, families and activities. They heard weapons cocked very close to their ears.
“They said, ‘What do you think of Oct. 7? Are you with [Hamas]?’” Qarawi said. “I told him: ‘We are civilians. That is between you and the militants.’”
Sometime before midnight, the brothers were allowed to walk out of the camp to the mosque, where Qarawi rubbed his raw wrists, knowing he would be here until the Israeli military left and unsure what he would find when he returned.
There was also Walid Abdulrahman, 45, a traffic cop from Nur Shams. He said Israeli forces raided his home on Thursday morning, and packed him and 25 of his neighbors into an armored personnel carrier, where they were held for three hours.
“They handcuffed us from behind, packed us until the vehicle and cut off the air conditioning,” he said, recalling the day’s events in the 87-degree heat. “We asked for water and they didn’t give it to us,” he said. “One of the soldiers peed in a bottle and said, ‘If you want to drink, drink this.’”
The IDF did not respond to a request for comment about the treatment of detainees around Tulkarm.
In Fara’a, to the east, crowds of mourners gathered Thursday to bury four men and boys killed in an airstrike the day before. Earlier on Wednesday, the IDF said that they were “armed terrorists that posed a threat to the forces.”
Images from the funeral published by Reuters showed a rifle laid on top of the shroud of one of the dead, a hallmark of a militant. But among the four were brothers Mohammad Na’jeh, 17, and Murad Na’jeh, 13, according to a relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about his safety. Their father and older brother were injured in the strike; the brother, Bashar, remains in serious condition in the ICU.
“Mohammad and Murad were preparing themselves for school,” the relative said. “Both are students — they are innocent people, they have nothing to do with the battalion.”
“If Bashar dies, God forbid, Masoud will have lost his three sons,” he added.
Parker reported from Cairo and Timsit from London. Hazem Balousha in Cairo and Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
