RAMALLAH (AFP) – Israeli forces shot dead six Palestinians yesterday in a raid on a refugee camp in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
The ministry did not identify those who died, but said they had been killed “by bullets from the occupation (Israel) in the Al-Fara refugee camp” near Tubas.
The Israeli army did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Clashes escalated with the (Israeli) forces who stormed the camp amid intense fire and… explosions,” said the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Violence has flared in the territory since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. On Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said four Palestinians, two of them teenagers, were killed in multiple Israeli operations around the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.
The Palestinian Authority said Israeli fire and settler attacks in the West Bank have killed at least 263 Palestinians since the Israel-Hamas war began.
This exceeds the entire death toll of 235, most of them Palestinians, killed in the Israeli Palestinian conflict last year.
Last month, 14 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid in the city of Jenin, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Health Ministry.
It was the highest West Bank death toll from a single raid since 2005, according to United Nations records.
Israel’s military said at the time that soldiers and other security forces had killed “several terrorists” with a drone strike and others in gunfights, seizing weapons and destroyed a “tunnel shaft containing ready-to-use explosive devices”.
Israeli officials and military have regularly charged that the Jenin refugee camp in the city had turned into a “terrorist hub” where armed groups are present alongside tens of thousands of residents. According to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), since the war broke out Palestinian gunshot victims in the occupied West Bank are now being shot more often in the head and torso rather than the limbs. Without specifying who was responsible for the shootings, MSF’s international president Christos Christou said on Thursday there had been a “clear shift” in the injuries witnessed by MSF staff.
“When you see that shift in the trauma, you will see more and more dead people,” he said.
