DM Monitoring
WEST BANK: Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank killed five Palestinians in-cluding a militant on Monday, in a raid that saw seven Israeli secu-rity personnel wounded and rare helicopter fire.
The sound of gunfire was heard across Jenin as wounded Palestinians contin-ued to arrive by ambulance at the northern West Bank city’s Ibn Sina hospital into the early afternoon, an AFP journalist said.
Crowds gathered outside Jenin government hospital, as the funerals of those killed in 11 hours of fighting began.
The Palestinian health ministry said five people had been killed and at least 91 others were wounded in the violence.
It named four of those killed: 15-year-old Ahmed Saqer, Khaled Assassa, 21, Qais Jabareen, 21, Ahmad Daraghmeh, 19, and Qassam Abu Saria, 29. Mean-while, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed Abu Saria as a fighter for the mili-tant group.
Among the injured was Palestinian journalist Hazem Nasser, who was hospi-talised with a gunshot wound, according to the Palestinian journalists syndi-cate.
Jenin’s deputy governor, Kamal Abu al-Rub, told AFP the Israeli forces had launched the raid at around 4:00am (0100 GMT).
“The army stormed the (Jenin refugee) camp and the city after the dawn pray-er in large numbers, and there was intense gunfire,” he said.
An AFP journalist at the scene said Israeli forces withdrew from Jenin at around 15:10 (1210 GMT).
The Israeli army said an armoured vehicle had been hit by a “very unusual and dramatic” explosive device at around 7:10am (0410 GMT), during “routine ac-tivity” to arrest two “wanted suspects” — one affiliated with the movement Hamas and the other with the Islamic Jihad. “We had five Israeli border police guys wounded, and two soldiers also lightly wounded,” army spokesman Rich-ard Hecht said. “From that point, we had to extract our injured.”
“It will take a few hours, it’s going to be pretty harsh, there is a lot of fire,” he added in the early afternoon.
The army said that an Apache helicopter had fired missiles in support of the soldiers, a rare move in the West Bank.
A Palestinian intelligence official told AFP on condition of anonymity it was the first time since 2002 — during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising — that the Israeli army has fired missiles from an aircraft during a raid in Jenin.
The United Nations rights chief, Volker Turk, said he was “extremely worried by the deteriorating situation”.
“Unlawful killings of Palestinians by the Israeli security forces have increased, including apparent extrajudicial executions,” he added.
Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has escalated over the past year, es-pecially after the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netan-yahu took power in December.
