UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk today denounced the vicious cycle of violence in Israel and the occupied West Bank, which “must stop”, while calling on Israeli forces to respect international norms.

“The recent operation in the occupied West Bank and the car attack in Tel Aviv alarmingly highlight a familiar sequence of events: violence only begets more violence.

The deaths, attacks on physical integrity and destruction of property must stop,” he said in a written statement.

A car attack injured seven people in Tel Aviv today as the Israeli army continued its wide-scale operation that killed 10 Palestinians in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, hailed the “heroic” attack as “a first response to the crimes against our people in the Jenin camp”, where Israel held from Monday until late tonight his biggest military operation in years in the West Bank.

According to Volker Turk, the scope of the operation of the Israeli security forces in Jenin “including the repeated airstrikes and the destruction of property, raise a number of serious questions in relation to the respect of international norms on the subject of human rights”.

“Some of the methods and some of the weapons used (…) are more generally associated with the conduct of hostilities in the context of an armed conflict than with the application of the law,” he pointed out.

The UN official therefore considers the airstrikes to be against the rules applicable to the conduct of law and order operations: “In an occupied territory, the deaths resulting from these airstrikes can also constitute intentional homicide.”

Turk therefore calls for operations in the occupied West Bank to comply with international human rights rules in relation to the use of force, stressing that these rules remain the same even when it comes to “fighting terrorism”.