Thousands flee Jenin camp as Israeli operation leaves 10 Palestinians dead
At least 10 Palestinians have been killed and thousands have fled after Israeli forces hit the city of Jenin with drone strikes during a major military operation.
The Palestinian mission to the United Nations (UN) has urged the international community to act in order to protect civilians as it accused Israel of an “absolute disregard for human life” during the largest military action in Jenin for years.
Gun battles raged between Israeli troops and militants from the Jenin Brigades in the city’s refugee camp.
At times during the morning, at least six drones could be seen circling over the West Bank city and the adjoining camp, which houses around 14,000 refugees in less than half a square kilometre.
The Palestinian health ministry said 10 people were killed and 100 others wounded, 20 of them seriously.
The Israeli military operation against the Jenin refugee camp is the largest since the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising which lasted from 2000 to 2005.
Jenin deputy governor Kamal Abu al-Roub told the AFP new agency that around 3,000 people had left the camp with arrangements made to house them in schools and other shelters in the city.
The camp has been at the heart of an escalation of violence across the West Bank that has triggered mounting global alarm without so far opening the way to a resumption of political negotiations that have been stalled for almost a decade.
Military bulldozers ploughed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces during the fighting which started from after midnight.
Residents described soldiers breaking through the walls to pass from house to house.
“Nothing is safe in the camp. They dug up the roads with bulldozers. Why? What did the camp do?” said Hussein Zeidan, 67, as he recovered from his wounds in hospital.
Palestinian ambulance driver Khaled Alahmad said: “There were strikes from the sky targeting the camp, every time we drive in, around five to seven ambulances and we come back full of injured.
“What is going on in the refugee camp is real war.”
One man told the BBC: “I met my brother’s friend. I went up to him and had barely said a few words when he dropped on the ground. I went to run away, then I got hit by two bullets.”
Another man told the broadcaster there had been a “massacre” in the camp.
“There are children and civilians and they’re not letting them out,” he added. “Our electricity is cut, they have dug up all our roads. The camp will be destroyed.”
Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland warned the explosion of violence was “very dangerous.”
UN spokesman Farhan Haq said the Israeli drone strikes were “attacks on heavily populated areas are violations of international humanitarian law.”
Lynn Hastings, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Palestinian areas, tweeted that she was “alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation” and airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp.
The UN was mobilising humanitarian aid, she added.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said many camp residents were in need of food, drinking water and milk powder
During the clashes, Palestinian youths occasionally threw stones at army vehicles before running away.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his forces were in “the nest of terrorists in Jenin” and “destroying command centres and seizing considerable weaponry”.
But the Palestinian foreign ministry branded the escalation of violence “an open war against the people of Jenin”.
Army raids in cities such as Jenin have become routine over the last year, which has seen a series of deadly attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and rampages by Jewish settler mobs against Palestinian villages.
