RAMALLAH: Israeli forces shot dead six Palestinians on Friday in a raid on a refugee camp in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.
The ministry did not identify those who died, but said they had been killed “by bullets from the occupation (Israel) in the Al-Fara refugee camp” near Tubas.
The Israeli army did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Clashes escalated with the (Israeli) forces who stormed the camp amid intense fire and… explosions,” said the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Violence has flared in the territory since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Palestinian group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
On Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said four Palestinians, two of them teenagers, were killed in multiple Israeli operations around the occupied West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.
The Palestinian Authority says Israeli fire and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank have killed at least 263 Palestinians since the Israel-Hamas war began.
This exceeds the entire death toll of 235, most of them Palestinians, killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last year.
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Last month, 14 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid in the city of Jenin, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry.
It was the highest occupied West Bank death toll from a single raid since 2005, according to United Nations records.
Israel’s military said at the time that soldiers and other security forces had killed “several terrorists” with a drone strike and others in gunfights, seizing weapons and destroyed a “tunnel shaft containing ready-to-use explosive devices”.
Israeli officials and military have regularly charged that the Jenin refugee camp in the city had turned into a “terrorist hub” where armed groups are present alongside tens of thousands of residents.
According to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), since the war broke out Palestinian gunshot victims in the occupied West Bank are now being shot more often in the head and torso rather than the limbs.
Without specifying who was responsible for the shootings, MSF’s international president Christos Christou said on Thursday there had been a “clear shift” in the injuries witnessed by MSF staff.
“When you see that shift in the trauma, you will see more and more dead people,” he said.
The war in the Gaza Strip was triggered by Hamas gunmen’s unprecedented attack in southern Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw around 240 taken hostage, Israeli officials say.
In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and has carried out air strikes and a ground offensive in Gaza that has killed nearly 17,200 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas authorities in the Palestinian territory.
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