TULKAREM: Palestinian officials said an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday killed five people, including a woman and her daughter, while the Israeli military said it “eliminated” a Hamas commander.

During the pre-dawn operation in Tulkarem refugee camp, Israeli drones struck and killed the head of Hamas’s military wing in Tulkarem, Ashraf Nafea, the military said in a statement.

“Ashraf was responsible for manufacturing and embedding explosives intended to attack IDF (Israeli) soldiers,” it said.

Hamas confirmed the “cowardly assassination” of commander Ashraf Eid Nafea and his companions. The head of the camp committee said that Israeli troops killed five people in the operation.

“A mother and her daughter were martyred and three young men were struck by a drone,” Faisal Salamah said. An activist from the camp, who asked not to be identified, confirmed the toll and said the woman and her daughter were volunteers with the ambulance service.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said it had treated a 30-year-old man for bullet wounds to the abdomen, thigh and hand, and three women for shrapnel wounds, one of them to the eye.

Palestinian official news agency Wafa said more than 25 military vehicles, including bulldozers, stormed the camp, scooping up rubble to block its alleys.

A woman in the camp said that “streets, shops and houses” were all destroyed in the raid. “They (the Israeli army) aim at destroying the infrastructure in the camps so they can eventually push people to leave,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified for security reasons.

In a separate incident near the southern West Bank city of Hebron, Israeli troops killed two people in the town of Sa’ir, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2024