Israeli forces killed at least ten Palestinians and wounded more than 100 in a gun battle that erupted during a daytime attack in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian officials said on Wednesday.
The incursion into the city of Nablus was one of the bloodiest in recent years, and came amid clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants that have fueled fears that the security situation in the region could spiral out of control.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted three militants behind the previous attack who it said were planning new attacks “in the near future”. Two members of the Lions’ Den, a militant group based in Nablus, and the third is a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said the Israeli military.
He said his forces surrounded them in a building in OId City and set it on fire when they refused to surrender. Footage posted on social media showed the OId City building reduced to rubble with smoke rising from the wreckage, and an airplane.
The Palestinian Authority condemned the attack as “state terrorism and a dangerous escalation of the conflict”, while Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, said its “patience has run out”.
Palestinian Health Ministry officials said seven of the 102 wounded were in critical condition. The militant group claimed six of the dead as its members.
Wednesday’s attack was the biggest since Israel’s new government, considered the most right-wing in the country’s history, took office in December with ultranationalists in key security posts promising to take a tougher stance on Palestinians.
It capped a month of escalating violence, with Israeli commandos killing 10 Palestinians during a raid on a Jenin refugee camp in late January, and a Palestinian gunman shooting dead seven Israelis outside a synagogue in the East Jerusalem settlement the next day.
Two weeks ago, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians in an attack in Jericho, while a car-ramming by Palestinians killed three Israelis at a bus stop near Jerusalem.
In total, Israeli forces have killed 57 Palestinians in the West Bank this year, according to the Palestinian health ministry, while Palestinian attackers have killed 10 Israelis. According to the UN, 2022 is the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since data was collected in 2005.
The deteriorating security situation has prompted warnings from diplomats and other security officials intifadasimilar to the Palestinian uprisings of the 1980s and 2000s, may lie ahead.
Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, who was a senior US diplomat during the second intifada in the early 2000s, warned this month that “what we are seeing now has an unpleasant resemblance to some of the realities we are also seeing” .
“In my conversations with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, I am concerned about the prospect of greater fragility and greater violence between Israel and Palestine,” he said after returning from a visit to the region.