Pallade Veneta - Israel launches deadly West Bank operation as Gaza war drags on

Violence has surged in the West Bank during the Gaza conflict sparked by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel.

The war has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry. It has also caused widespread destruction in the Palestinian territory, displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million people at least once and triggered a humanitarian crisis.

In the West Bank in the early hours of Wednesday, the Israeli military launched a series of coordinated raids across four cities -- Jenin, Nablus, Tubas and Tulkarem.

The army said it was carrying out a "counter-terrorism operation" involving air strikes, ground forces and bulldozers.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said the Israeli forces killed at least 10 people, including two Palestinians in Jenin, four in a nearby village and four more in a refugee camp near Tubas. Fifteen others were wounded.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia and headed home to "follow up on the latest developments in light of the Israeli aggression on the northern West Bank," Palestinian official media said.

The Israeli army said it had killed nine Palestinian "terrorists" in its ongoing operation, adding that so far there were no casualties on the Israeli side.

Soldiers encountered explosives and were engaging in exchanges of live fire with militants, it said.

"We have met explosives already in the first hours, and we have met real-time fire exchanged with terrorists engaging in battle," spokesman Nadav Shoshani told reporters.

The troops were targeting a "mixture of terror groups and terror cells", he said, declining to say how many were involved or how long the operation would last.

Shoshani said the current operation was not "extremely different (from usual army activity in the area) or special".

- 'This is war' -

Foreign Minster Israel Katz had a different take, however, saying the military was "operating in full force since last night" in a bid to "dismantle Iranian-Islamic terror infrastructure".

In a post on X, he accused Iran, Israel's main foe in the region, of seeking to "establish an eastern front against Israel" based on the "model" for Gaza and Lebanon, where it backs Hamas and Hezbollah, respectively.

"We must address this threat with the same determination used against terror infrastructures in Gaza, including temporary evacuation of residents and any necessary measures," he said.

"This is a war, and we must win it."

Since Hamas's October 7 attack, Israeli troops or settlers have killed more than 650 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian health ministry figures.

During the same period, at least 19 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks, according to Israeli officials.

But while Israeli military operations have become a daily occurrence in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967, it is rare for them to be carried out in multiple cities simultaneously.

In recent weeks, Israeli operations in the West Bank have focused on the north of the territory, where armed groups fighting against Israel are particularly active.

- 'Open war' -

The latest operation comes two days after Israel said it carried out an air strike on the West Bank that the Palestinian Authority reported killed five people.

The Israeli army confirmed the five deaths on Wednesday and said the strike hit a structure "used by the terrorists to conduct terrorist activity and harm (Israeli) soldiers operating in the area".

It identified one of the dead as Jibril Jasan Ismail Jibril, who was released in November as part of the only Gaza truce so far, in November.

Last week, the army announced it had killed a senior Palestinian militant in Lebanon, accusing him of "directing attacks and smuggling weapons" to the West Bank and collaborating with Iranian forces.

Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian Islamist movement allied with Hamas which has a strong presence in the north of the West Bank, issued a statement early Wednesday denouncing an "open war" by Israel.

"With this aggression, which aims to transfer the weight of the conflict to the occupied West Bank, the occupier wants to impose a new state of affairs on the ground to annex the West Bank," the statement said.

Hamas, whose popularity has soared in the West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, late Tuesday reiterated its call for Palestinians in the territory to "rise up".

Ben Gvir, a settler himself, has openly called for the annexation of the West Bank.

Hamas's October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign since then has killed at least 40,534 people in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.

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L.Barone--PV