JENIN (AFP) – Israel said it killed three Hamas militants in an air strike in the occupied West Bank yesterday, taking the death toll from a large-scale military operation now in its third day to at least 19.
A top United Nations (UN) aid official meanwhile questioned “what has become of our basic humanity”, as the war raged on in Gaza and humanitarian operations struggle to respond.
The UN has warned the military operation which Israel launched in the West Bank early Wednesday is “fuelling an already explosive situation” in the territory and has pressed Israel to end it.
In the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged she will not change Washington’s policy of supplying weapons to Israel if elected to the top job in November. But she stressed it was time to “end this war”.
Israel has killed at least 19 Palestinians since Wednesday, the military and the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
The military said it killed three Hamas militants in an air strike near the northern city of Jenin yesterday.
Witnesses told AFP the strike hit a car in the town of Zababdeh, southeast of the city.
Israeli troops pulled back from other West Bank towns late on Thursday but fighting raged on around Jenin, long a hub of militant activity.
The AFP journalist reported loud explosions from the city’s refugee camp and thick plumes of smoke rising from the area.
In Gaza, Israeli artillery pounded western areas of Gaza City early yesterday, an AFP journalist said, while a medical source at the southern Nasser Hospital said an Israeli strike killed three people near the southern city of Khan Yunis.
The World Health Organization said Israel had agreed to at least three days of “humanitarian pauses” in parts of Gaza, starting tomorrow, to facilitate a vaccination drive after the first case of polio in a quarter of a century was recorded in the territory.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the measures were “not a ceasefire”.
The Israeli assault in the West Bank has caused significant destruction, especially in Tulkarem, whose governor Mustafa Taqatqa described the raids as “unprecedented” and a “dangerous signal”.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club advocacy group said at least 45 people had been detained in the West Bank since Wednesday.
The UN said on Wednesday that at least 637 Palestinians had been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers since the Gaza war began.
In Gaza, Israeli shelling in the Jabalia refugee camp killed two people yesterday, the civil defence agency in the Hamas-ruled territory said.
The UN had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir el-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers.
“More than 88 per cent of Gaza’s territory has come under an (Israeli) order to evacuate at some point,” the acting head of the UN humanitarian office Joyce Msuya.
She said civilians were being forced into just 11 per cent of the Gaza Strip, already one of the most densely populated territories in the world before the war.
“What we have witnessed over the past 11 months… calls into question the world’s commitment to the international legal order that was designed to prevent these tragedies,” Msuya said. “It forces us to ask: what has become of our basic sense of humanity?”
