The Palestinian Authority announced late Thursday that eighteen people were killed in an Israeli air strike on the refugee camp of Tulkarem, a town in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli armed forces confirmed that they had launched a strike.

“Eighteen martyrs after the shelling of the Tulkarem camp by the occupation,” the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry informed via Telegram, revising again for the worse the previous count, which spoke of 16 dead.

The West Bank has remained under Israeli occupation since 1967.

“As part of a joint operation by the armed forces and the Shin Bet (Israel’s counter-intelligence agency), the Israeli Air Force carried out a strike in Tulkarem,” the Israeli military said in a terse statement.

Speaking to AFP by phone, Faisal Salama, an official at the refugee camp, said the attack was carried out by an F-16 multi-role fighter jet that bombed a cafe.

The Israeli aircraft “hit a cafeteria on the ground floor of a three-story building,” social activist Alaa Sroji also said. “There are many victims in the hospital, children, young people, the (final) number is not yet known,” he added.

Tulkarem is among the towns and refugee camps targeted in late August by the Israeli military’s large-scale operations against Palestinian armed movements in the northern West Bank.

Since the outbreak of war in the Gaza Strip between Israel’s armed forces and Hamas on October 7, sparking an unprecedented raid by the Palestinian Islamist movement on the southern part of the Israeli territory, violence between Palestinians on the one hand and the Israeli army and settlers on the other escalated rapidly.

Since then, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed by soldiers or settlers, according to figures from the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry, and at least 24 Israelis, including soldiers, in Palestinian attacks or as part of military operations, according to official Israeli figures.