The Israel launched yesterday Wednesday a large-scale deadly military operation in the northern sectors of the occupied West Bankalarming the UN, against the background of the war with Hamas which has been going on in the Gaza Strip for almost eleven months.

The Israeli armed forces “eliminated nine armed terrorists” in Jenin, Toumbas and Tulkarem, including seven in airstrikes, according to a statement. For its part, the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian Authority spoke of “eleven dead”, to which are added 24 wounded, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Among the dead are “children”, according to the UN, whose Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was monitoring the situation with “deep concern”. He decried the use of “war tactics” that go beyond “international norms for the maintenance of order.”

According to the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, three of those killed in the Jenin refugee camp were members of its military arm.

Last night, gunfire and explosions continued to ring out in this city, a stronghold of armed movements fighting against Israel, AFP journalists found on the ground.

The Israeli military has been pounding the Gaza Strip relentlessly since the unprecedented Hamas offensive in southern Israel since October 7. However, in the West Bank, simultaneous ground operations with air support in multiple cities are rather rare.

On the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, columns of Israeli armored personnel carriers entered the refugee camps of Noor Shams, near Tulkarem, Al Fara, near Toumbas, as well as Jenin.

“Medical teams have been blocked since the beginning of the attack, and the entrances to the Noor Shams camp and hospitals in the area have been blocked to hinder” their work, said Ahmed Zahran, a rescuer with the Red Crescent.

“The devastation is enormous,” as the Israeli army hit “infrastructure in the Noor Shams settlement,” destroying “the water and sewage network,” Hakim Abu Safiyya, a worker in the Tulkarem municipality, told AFP.

The Israeli armed forces said they were conducting operations to “disarm roadside bombs” that caused “unintentional” damage to the water supply network.

The head of the municipality in Tulkarem Mustafa Takataka said the Israeli raids send a “dangerous and unprecedented” message, adding that “everything seems to indicate that this operation will last.”

Israeli operations are daily in the occupied West Bank, although under the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace accords — which are described as clinically dead — the Israeli military was supposed not to enter the autonomous Palestinian territories, which would be under the sole control of its security forces. Palestinian Authority.

Since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which is now in its 328th day, violence in the West Bank, an area under Israeli occupation since 1967, has taken off.

At least 637 Palestinians have been killed there since then, according to the UN, while at least 19 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or operations, according to official Israeli figures.

The US government, which insists it opposes any expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, announced new sanctions on Wednesday against “extremist” settlers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the “imposition of sanctions against Israeli citizens” “very serious”.

Illegal under international law, the settlement of the West Bank continued by all Israeli governments, regardless of color, after the occupation of the Palestinian territory in 1967.

But it intensified after far-right ministers took over in the government formed in December 2022 by Mr. Netanyahu.

A spokesman for the Israeli army downplayed the importance of the operations, which according to him are not “very different” from ordinary ones.

According to Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, the armed forces aim to “dismantle terrorist Irano-Islamist infrastructure” in the West Bank. He called on the army via X to act “with the same determination (…) as in Gaza”, and to order “temporary hasty removals” of Palestinians.

Izzat Risk, a Hamas official, saw in this statement an intention to escalate “the destruction and the genocide”.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a movement considered close to Hamas, accused Israel of “annexing the West Bank”.

In the Gaza Strip, the civil protection spoke of at least 12 dead, among them a child and a woman, in new Israeli bombardments.

The Israeli army announced for its part that it recovered in Gaza the body of a soldier who had been killed on October 7. Of the 251 people abducted and taken to the enclave that day, 103 are believed to remain hostages in the Gaza Strip, but 33 of them have been declared dead by the Israeli military.

Residents of the enclave continue to be displaced, amid multiplying emergency evacuation orders for civilians issued by the Israeli armed forces, a flight complicated by incessant shelling. The situation makes it very difficult to transport and distribute humanitarian aid in the small besieged and devastated area.

The World Food Program (WFP) of the UN announced yesterday that it is suspending, “until further notice”, the movements of its staff in the Gaza Strip, after its vehicle with “visible insignia”, equipped with “permits from the Israeli authorities”, became the target of Israelis of fire, without any casualties. The Israeli armed forces have not commented on this episode so far.

At the same time, the mediators in the indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas – Qatar, Egypt and the US – continue efforts to conclude a cease-fire agreement between the warring sides, which will be accompanied by the release of hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli detention centers.

After the talks in Cairo, an Israeli delegation went to Doha yesterday for “technical level” talks with mediators, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel left 1,199 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.

Wide-scale Israeli military retaliatory operations in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has ruled since 2007, have wreaked havoc in the enclave, killing at least 40,534 people, according to the Palestinian movement’s health ministry, which did not elaborate. how many were combatants and how many civilians. However, according to the UN, most of the victims are women and children.