• Olive farmer killed in clashes with settlers in West Bank village
• Five killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza
GAZA / RAMALLAH: Israel’s military destroyed on Wednesday memorials across the occupied West Bank to Palestinians accused of killing Israelis or who died in clashes, on the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 raid.
The military took action across the occupied West Bank “to destroy monuments to terrorists”, an army spokesperson said, without explicitly connecting the move to the anniversary of the raid.
Troops destroyed a stone monument and tore down commemorative posters in the northern region of Jenin, governorate spokeswoman Hala Abu Baker said.
“A memorial to the martyr Yasser Hamdouni was destroyed in the town of Yaabad, and photos of various martyrs were removed from several locations in the city of Jenin,” she said.
Hamdouni was accused of killing an Israeli settler in 2003, and died while serving a life sentence in 2016.
Israeli politicians have frequently denounced monuments, seeing them as glorifying attacks, but it is rare for the army to destroy them, especially in areas nominally under Palestinian Authority control.
But Palestinians refer to those killed by Israeli fire or in Israeli prisons as martyrs, with stone memorials or posters commemorating them a frequent sight in West Bank villages and towns.
Separately, in Beit Duqqu, the army destroyed the home of a Palestinian man who was accused of killing an Israeli settler last month, the town’s mayor and an AFP journalist reported.
Mayor Nazmi Mansour said that “the Israeli army raided the town at 4am and distributed leaflets saying it would demolish the home of detainee Qadri Samara”.
An AFP journalist saw an Israeli military bulldozer clearing the rubble of a house after it was blown up amid a heavy deployment of Israeli forces in the town northwest of Jerusalem.
On the same day, a man was killed and nine injured during a settler attack while Palestinians were harvesting olives, followed by army intervention in an occupied West Bank village.
The Palestinian health ministry said 44-year-old Ali al-Bazzari died and nine others were injured “as a result of an assault by occupation forces and settlers” on the village of Burqa, north of Nablus in the northern West Bank.
The Israeli military said troops and border police forces had been dispatched to the area after reports of “rock hurling toward an Israeli civilian, who was injured”.
During an ensuing confrontation between dozens of Palestinians and Israeli settlers, “a security personnel member and an additional Israeli civilian opened fire” at the scene, the military said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said in separate statements that its teams treated three people wounded by live fire, one of them seriously, and five people injured after being assaulted and beaten in Burqa, and transported the injured to hospitals.
The organisation added that Israeli forces “assaulted and beat ambulance crews” and detained staff as they tried to reach the wounded in the area.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, fresh strikes claimed the lives of five people. Al-Shifa hospital reported two people killed in an Israeli strike overnight.
Gaza’s civil defence identified one of the dead as Mohamed Tamous and said he was a volunteer for the agency, which serves as an emergency rescue service under Hamas.
In the southern city of Khan Yunis, Nasser Hospital said that a 60-year-old man, Hisham Ibrahim Abu Mustafa, was killed in an Israeli strike and that others were injured.
The hospital also reported receiving the body of Ziad Zaarab, who it said was killed in an Israeli airstrike south of Khan Yunis that left several injured.
A strike on a tent in the Al-Buraq camp in the afternoon killed another person, the hospital said.
Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2026
