TULKARM: Israeli forces killed five Palestinians in an overnight raid in a village near the city of Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry and the Israeli military said on Saturday.

The health ministry said it had identified four of the five who died during the raid in Deir al-Ghusun. Israeli forces took some of the dead bodies, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa and a reporter at the scene.

The Israeli military said an officer from a special police unit was wounded in the operation and hospitalised. It said its forces retaliated using live ammunition and shoulder-fired missiles after they were fired on.

Saturday’s operation near the flashpoint city of Tulkarm was the latest in a series of clashes in the occupied West Bank between Israeli forces and Palestinians that has been escalating for more than two years but which has picked up in intensity since last October.A photographer saw a heavy military deployment in the village of Deir al-Ghusun, near the northern town of Tulkarem. Troops deployed a bulldozer to flatten a building and carried at least one body out of the rubble, the photographer reported.

Troops deployed a bulldozer to flatten a building and carried one body out of the rubble

Israeli forces “engaged in an extensive 12-hour counterterrorism operation in the Tulkarem area,” the army and the Shin Bet security service said in a joint statement.

They said troops had come under fire after entering the village to “neutralise a terrorist cell” and had “retaliated” with “live ammunition, shoulder-fired missiles and other weaponry”.

An army drone registered two hits on the building before sappers moved in to “dismantle” it.

“The confrontation ended with the elimination of five terrorists, and the seizure of military gear and weapon components,” the joint statement said.

A member of a counterterrorism unit of Israel’s border police was wounded in the operation, it added.According to Palestinian Health Ministry records, 492 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers in the West Bank or East Jerusalem since Oct 7. Stone-throwing youths and uninvolved civilians have also been killed.

Palestinians want the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, as the core of an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2024