Israeli Raid Kills at Least 5 Palestinians in West Bank
The Israeli Army said the deaths came during an operation to arrest gunmen accused of attempting an attack. Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, said the men were members of its armed wing.
Israeli military forces killed at least five Palestinian fighters near the city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank on Monday, during a firefight that the Israeli Army said began after soldiers sought to arrest gunmen accused of recently attempting an attack at a nearby Israeli settlement.
Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, later said that the five men were members of its armed wing, in a rare acknowledgment of the group’s armed activity inside the West Bank, where it has recently kept a low profile.
The deaths near Jericho brought the number of Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank since the start of the year to more than 40, most of them during gun battles that broke out during Israeli operations to arrest members of armed Palestinian groups.
That toll constitutes the deadliest start to a year for Palestinians in the West Bank in the past decade and a half, drawing comparisons with the violence of the early years of this century, when a Palestinian uprising, known as the second intifada, left roughly 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis dead.
Seven Israelis have also been killed since the start of the year, all during a mass shooting on Jan. 27 by a Palestinian attacker in East Jerusalem — the deadliest attack in the city since 2008.
Israeli officials have said that the Israeli death toll this year could have been far higher if two Palestinians, both carrying assault rifles, had not aborted an attempted attack a day later at a restaurant in an Israeli settlement south of Jericho, a Palestinian city in the east of the occupied West Bank, close to the border with Jordan.
Video circulating on social media of the episode appeared to show two men with assault rifles arriving at the restaurant before suddenly retreating; Israeli officials said one of their weapons malfunctioned.
The Israeli Army said that its raid on Monday morning on a Palestinian neighborhood adjacent to the settlement was an attempt to capture the two men and other members of their cell. At least five Palestinians were killed during an ensuing gunfight, an Israeli security official said.
Israeli soldiers took the bodies with them after the raid, later informing Palestinian officials of their identities.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said that three others were injured in the gun battle. The Israeli Army circulated a photograph of five assault rifles that it said Israeli soldiers had taken from Palestinians at the scene.
Tensions were already high in the West Bank amid rising Palestinian anger at the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation, which began when Israel captured the territory from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.
Hundreds of Israeli settlements have since been built there, curbing Palestinian hopes of sovereignty, and leading to the emergence of a two-tier legal system that tries settlers in civilian courts and Palestinians in military ones.
In response to that impasse, new groups of young Palestinian fighters have emerged in the past year, some of which have been unusually active in striking Israeli targets. Their members are angry at both Israel and their leaders in the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that administers Palestinian areas in the West Bank and which many Palestinians perceive as working too closely with Israeli officials.
Conscious of that perception, the authority partially suspended its coordination with the Israeli security establishment last month — a relationship that has helped to curb spasms of past violence.
After initially avoiding claiming direct connection to the incident, Hamas announced late Monday afternoon that the five slain fighters were members of its armed wing. Though dominant in Gaza, Hamas has in recent years kept a lower profile in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinian areas like Jericho are dominated by Fatah, a secular political movement.
Amid the current surge of violence, Hamas has previously avoided claiming direct responsibility for attacks, leery of provoking Israeli reprisals on Gaza. But a direct connection between violence in the West Bank and the Hamas leadership could risk drawing Gaza into the fight.
(c) 2023, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-west-bank-jericho-raids.html
