Israel Says It Killed 10 Hamas Fighters in Major Operation in West Bank

A column of Israeli armored vehicles leave following a military operation in Tubas, West Bank, on Aug. 14, 2024. Majdi Mohammed/AP

Israel said it killed 10 Hamas fighters on Aug. 28 after sending troops into the West Bank city of Jenin in a counterterrorist operation.

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted an operation in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm on Aug. 28.

Shoshani said three Hamas fighters were killed in an airstrike in Tulkarm and four in an airstrike in the Al-Faraa refugee camp.

He said another five suspected Hamas fighters were arrested. He noted that the raids were the first stage of an operation involving “large forces.”

In a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said: “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps might be required. This is a war in every respect, and we must win it.”

Hamas has called on Palestinians in the West Bank to rise up and “join the sacred battle” of its people.

Earlier, the Palestinian Health Ministry said two men—Qassam Muhammad Jabarin, 25, and Asem Walid Balout, 39—were killed in Jenin and seven others were killed in nearby Tubas early on Aug. 28.

The ministry is controlled by Fatah, unlike the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas.

It stated that 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Hamas launched its attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israel says it has been targeting terrorist groups and that on Aug. 28, some of those groups stated that they were exchanging fire with the IDF.

IDF Surrounds Jenin

The governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, told a Palestinian radio station that the IDF had blockaded the city and was barring access to hospitals.

Jenin, a city of 40,000 people in the far north of the West Bank, has been a stronghold of Palestinian terrorists in recent years.

About 14,000 of its citizens live in a refugee camp, built out of concrete and cinder blocks, which was originally constructed to house people displaced from their homes when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Many of the suicide bombers who targeted Israeli civilians between 2000 and 2005 were from Jenin.

The popularity of Fatah has fallen in recent years, and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces have failed to curb terrorist attacks.

In May, Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians and injured 25 others during a counterterrorist operation in Jenin.

Three more Palestinians were killed in another raid in June. Last month, the IDF stated that it had killed two senior Hamas terrorists in an air strike on a car near Jenin.

Tubas and Tulkarm are slightly farther south, with the latter being a short distance from the Israeli coastal city of Netanya.

Legality of Settlements

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel captured east Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza after defeating an alliance of Jordan, Egypt, and Syria.

In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and abandoned some settlements there.

Gaza was then taken over by Hamas, after clashes with Fatah, whose leader, Yasser Arafat, died in 2004.

In 1993, Arafat signed the Oslo Peace Accords, which should have paved the way for a so-called two-state solution.

It later collapsed after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and a series of suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israeli citizens, and Israel built a security wall separating the West Bank from Israel.

Fatah retained political power in the West Bank, where Israel has built scores of settlements, housing 500,000 Jewish settlers.

The settlements were been declared unlawful by the U.N.’s top court in a 2024 advisory ruling. Israel has ignored pressure from the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States to pause construction.

In 2016, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution reaffirming “that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity” and constituted a “flagrant violation under international law.”

The United States abstained.

On Aug. 27, the IDF announced that during a “complex operation in the southern Gaza Strip,” it rescued Qaid Farhan Alkadi, a 52-year-old ethnic Bedouin who had been held hostage since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.