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The Israeli military said it would press ahead with its biggest raid in the occupied West Bank in two decades, which killed 10 Palestinians and forced hundreds of families to flee the violence.
Hundreds of Israeli forces, backed by armed drones, entered the Jenin refugee camp in the early hours of Monday, sparking a fierce round of fighting that destroyed buildings and roads in the densely populated area.
An Israeli military spokesman told Israeli media that the incursion continued on Tuesday and that the army still had 10 sites in Jenin that it intended to search. But he also said there was no major fighting overnight between soldiers and militants.
Palestinian health officials said Tuesday that in addition to the 10 deaths, more than 100 people have been injured, 20 of them seriously. An Israeli soldier was also wounded.
The Red Crescent said earlier that about 500 families had been evacuated from the camp, which is home to about 14,000 people, but by midnight the Israeli forces closed its entrances.
The raid, which the Israeli military said was part of “intensive counterterrorism efforts”, comes after a year of escalating violence in the West Bank that has raised fears that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be on the verge of a renewed conflict.
This year is already on track to be the deadliest in the West Bank – which Palestinians seek as the heart of a future state, but which Israel has occupied since 1967 – since the United Nations began collecting data in 2005.
According to the latest UN figures, which do not include recent fighting, Israeli forces have killed 114 Palestinians in the area this year, while Palestinians have killed 16 Israelis.
Violence has reached new levels over the past two weeks, as Israel deployed helicopter gunships and armed drones over the West Bank for the first time since the early 2000s, when 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed during the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada.
The Jenin impoverished camp, a stronghold of militants from several Palestinian factions, has become a focus of violence, with Israeli forces repeatedly carrying out raids over the past 18 months.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had destroyed two “operations rooms”, a storehouse of explosives and a grenade launcher belonging to armed groups, and had seized weapons and other military equipment.
Doctors Without Borders, another aid organisation, said Israeli military bulldozers had destroyed several roads leading into the camp, “making it almost impossible for ambulances to reach patients”.
“Palestinian medics were forced to walk in an area with active fire and drone attacks,” the group said.
The Red Crescent said that its team in the camp had been denied access to certain sites and had “great difficulty” moving around due to the destruction.
Leaders from Arab and Islamic countries condemned the raid, and the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it “violated (d) all international norms and laws and the most basic human values”. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry warned that this could lead to “a new cycle of violence”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads the most right-wing government in the country’s history, defended the operation, insisting that Israel was “defining a new equation against terrorism”.
“Our guiding principle is simple: Whoever kills Israelis, whoever plots to kill us, will either be in prison or in the grave,” he said at a ceremony on Monday night.