Israel raid in West Bank enters second day after 8 killed

Israeli forces raided the West Bank city of Jenin on Wednesday, an AFP correspondent reported, a day after soldiers killed eight Palestinians.

Troops fought militants in the city's refugee camp for a second day, with explosions and gunfire heard from inside, while soldiers in Israeli armoured vehicles fired at masked youths in the city centre, the correspondent said.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said Israeli forces had killed eight people and wounded 24 during the fighting, which began on Tuesday morning.

An AFP correspondent on Tuesday saw four bodies at Jenin's Khalil Suleiman government hospital morgue.

Israel's army said Wednesday that troops had "exchanged fire with armed men and killed a number of terrorists, including two terrorists who threw explosives at the forces".

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa and medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported that surgeon Usaeed Jabareen, from the government hospital, was among those killed.

A schoolteacher and a student were also among the dead, Wafa reported, quoting hospital director Wissam Bakr.

The Israeli army said it had raided the house of Ahmed Barakat, who was suspected of involvement in an attack on an Israeli civilian last year.

Meir Tamari, 32, was killed in May 2023 at the entrance to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, medics and military officials said at the time.

The streets near the entrance to the camp were deserted on Wednesday afternoon, with drones buzzing overhead.

On the outskirts of the town, a group of Israeli armoured vehicles were parked near a roundabout, while agricultural workers toiled on a farm across the road.

- 'Criminal mentality' -

Palestinian militant group Hamas called the raid a "massacre" and deemed it "conclusive evidence of the criminal mentality that rules the occupying state and its ideological belief in killing our people".

The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas condemned the raid, saying in a statement on Wafa that Israel was "killing innocent people, doctors, and destroying the infrastructure of Palestinian hospitals, cities and villages".

Jenin has long been a stronghold of Palestinian militant groups and the Israeli army routinely carries out raids into the city and adjacent camp.

The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has seen a surge in violence for more than a year, but particularly since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7.

At least 514 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers since the Gaza war broke out, according to Palestinian officials.

Attacks by Palestinians have killed at least 12 Israelis in the West Bank over the same period, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

The Gaza Strip has been gripped by more than seven months of war since Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,709 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.