Palestinian officials announced on Tuesday that five people, including a mother and her daughter, were killed in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank during a raid by the Israeli army. In response, the Israeli army confirmed that it had killed a local Hamas commander.
According to several sources in the Tulkarem camp, one of the strongholds of Palestinian activism located in the far west of the West Bank occupied since 1967, Israeli forces invaded the camp early in the morning and killed five people.
Faisal Salamah, an official in the refugee camp, confirmed to AFP that the Israeli army entered the area “in the early hours” of Tuesday, killing “three young men” in addition to two women. Among the victims were a woman and her daughter who were working as volunteers for local emergency services, according to a source who requested anonymity.
The Israeli army, for its part, stated that it carried out a drone strike during the night that killed the leader of Hamas’s military wing in Tulkarem, Ashraf Nafea. The army added in its statement that Nafea was “responsible for manufacturing explosives intended to attack Israeli soldiers.”
Hamas, which has been at war with Israel since the bloody attack on October 7, confirmed the “cowardly assassination” of Commander Ashraf Eid Nafea in Tulkarem.
In a separate statement sent to AFP, an Israeli army spokesperson indicated that one of the two women killed was an “armed terrorist.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent reported at 2:00 AM on Tuesday that its teams had treated a man wounded by gunfire. It later reported that it had treated and transported three women to the hospital, one of whom was “injured in the eye by shrapnel” in the Tulkarem camp.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA mentioned an Israeli “drone attack” accompanied by an incursion of 25 military vehicles and numerous bulldozers.
Israeli army trucks were seen moving on Tuesday on a narrow road in the densely populated refugee camp, according to an AFP journalist.
In another development, two Palestinians were killed by Israeli army fire in the town of Sa’ir, near Hebron in the southern West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The war in the Gaza Strip has led to an escalation of violence in the occupied West Bank. Since October 7, at least 579 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers, according to Palestinian authorities. At least 16 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks, according to official Israeli data.