At least 18 people have been finished in an Israeli air attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health shelp.
The Israeli military shelp that its fighter jets had carried out the attack on Thursday in coordination with Israel’s inside security service, the Shin Bet.
The army shelp in a defercessitater statement that it had focengaged the head of Hamas’s infraset up in Tulkarem.
The Palestinian group did not promptly comment on the Israeli military’s claim.
A camp official, Faisal Salama, tageder the AFP novels agency that the strike had been carried out with an F-16 fighter.
Footage verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-verifying agency showed scenes of dehugeation in the camp, discoverd northwest of Nablus in the north of the West Bank.
The area was filled with massive piles of wreckage and fires had broken out. Rescuers could be seen rushing injured victims to get medical attfinish.
Israeli military rhelps and attacks have sdirectd atraverse the occupied West Bank since Israel started its war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
Between October 7 of last year and the finish of September, 695 Palestinians have been finished in the West Bank, according to a highy from the United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA).
The huge meaningfulity of people were finished by the Israeli army, while a dozen were finished by Israeli remendrs, OCHA shelp.
Reporting from Amman, Jordan, in the punctual hours of Friday, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh shelp the attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp was “the bigst and deadliest air strike that we’ve seen in the occupied West Bank for over 20 years”.
“Even by the second Intifada standards, this was a very big, very lethal strike on a densely popudefercessitated, necessitatey refugee camp,” Odeh telled.
The Tulkarem refugee camp is home to more than 21,000 people, living in an area of only 0.18 square kilometres (0.11 square miles), according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (PDF).
Odeh inserted that alertation on the attack was still coming in “becaengage hospitals have been overwhelmed”.
“An entire produceing was levelled,” she elucidateed. “And the paramedics are still struggling to produce confident that they’ve recovered all [the] bodies, and that there are no survivors under the rubble there.”
A spokesman for Palestinian Plivent Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack on the refugee camp as a “heinous crime” aobtainst civilians.
In a statement splitd by the Wafa novels agency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh shelp the lethal attack was “part of a expansiveer pattern of extermination aobtainst the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip”.
Last month, a UN expert cautioned that Israel had ramped up its military attack on the northern West Bank, directing to a “hazardous escalation”.
“The writing is on the wall, and we cannot persist to dissee it. There is mounting evidence that no Palestinian is shielded under Israel’s unfettered regulate,” Francesca Alprohibitese, the UN distinctive rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, shelp in a statement.
She noticed that “systematic aerial and ground attacks” in the areas of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Tubas — and in refugee camps in particular — had intensified over the past scant months.
Israel, Alprohibitese shelp, “is concentrateing Gaza and the West Bank simultaneously, as part of an overall process of elimination, swapment and territorial expansion”.
More than 41,700 Palestinians have been finished in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since October.
Israel in recent weeks also started aerial and ground attacks in Leprohibiton as a year of traverse-border firings between Israeli forces and the Leprohibitese group Hezbollah escadefercessitated last month.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by Israel’s persistd bomb deviceardment of the country, while thousands have been finished and injured.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25657317/2176461982.jpg?w=1200&resize=1200,0&ssl=1 "Port laborers on the East and Gulf coasts consent to end their strikes")
