The Israeli armed forces said on Saturday that they had killed 12 “terrorists” in Thursday’s shelling of a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, revising upwards an earlier tally they had released, while the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry said it evening of the same day that 18 people were killed.

Shortly after the shelling of the Tulkarem refugee camp in the northern West Bank, an area occupied by Israel since 1967, the army had announced an initial death toll of seven. However, in the announcement he made public yesterday, he spoke of a total of 12 “terrorists” who were killed.

“The army and the air force conducted a joint operation to hit terrorists who were planning to carry out a terrorist attack against Israeli citizens in the near future,” it said, adding that the 12 dead were members of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and its allied movement, of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The shelling in Tulkarem was the deadliest in the occupied West Bank since 2000, an AFP source in the Palestinian security forces underlined.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned yesterday Friday the “illegal aerial bombardment” of Israel, judging that it was “another clear example of the systematic resort to the use of lethal force by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank, often useless, disproportionate and therefore illegal”.

“The destruction of an entire building full of people by aerial bombardment testifies to Israel’s flagrant disregard for its obligations” under international law, the same source said, adding that he called for an independent investigation into the operation.

For its part, Germany’s diplomacy last Friday described the deadly Israeli aerial bombardment as “shocking”, criticizing the “high number of civilian casualties”.

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.