Israel Launches Assault on Armed Militants in West Bank City

Opening with a series of deadly airstrikes, the Israeli military embarked early Monday on what it called an “extensive counterterrorism effort” in the Jenin area of the occupied West Bank, a center of Palestinian militancy, killing at least five people it identified as armed suspects after a year of escalating violence there.

The military said the operation began shortly after 1 a.m. with a surprise drone attack on “terrorist infrastructure” in the area of Jenin, a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank that has recently been the focus of deadly Israeli Army raids.

The city has been the site of fierce gunfights between Israeli troops and militants that have also killed some Palestinian civilians, and it has been the launching point for Palestinian attacks on Israeli forces and civilians.

Military officials said that the assault was focused on militant targets in the densely populated Jenin refugee camp, a crowded quarter of residential buildings and alleyways abutting the city. Ground forces also moved in. The military described the city of Jenin and the camp on Monday as “an active combat area” and said that exchanges of fire were continuing there.

A spokesman for the Israeli military, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, said that about seven people suspected by Israel of hostile activity had been killed by Israeli fire in the first hours of the operation. The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed five fatalities in Jenin and said that at least 27 people had been wounded, several of them gravely.

In addition, Palestinian health officials said that a Palestinian man was fatally shot in the head by Israeli fire overnight in the West Bank town of Al Bireh, near Ramallah.

The Israeli military said that it had struck a joint operations center used by militants at the Jenin refugee camp where weapons and explosives were stored and where, according to military officials, at least 19 individuals accused of carrying out attacks on Israelis had found shelter in recent months.

The goal, Colonel Hecht said, was “to break the safe-haven mind-set” of the camp. He said the airstrikes were intended to “minimize friction” on the ground and the risk to Israeli troops, adding that the assault would go on for “as long as needed.”

Ground forces inside the camp were seizing weapons, he said. A map issued by the military indicated that the joint operations center in the camp was in the vicinity of several compounds run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides services for Palestinian refugees.

Israel last carried out extensive airstrikes in the West Bank during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, of the early 2000s.

Israeli officials said early Monday that they had been in contact with representatives of the Palestinian Authority, the provisional body created under the Oslo peace process in the mid-1990s to exercise limited self-rule in parts of the occupied West Bank, as well as with neighboring Jordan.

But the spokesman for the Palestinian presidency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, denounced the Israeli assault on Jenin as “ a new war crime against our defenseless people,” according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.

“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression,” he added.

Muhammad Sbaghi, a member of the Jenin camp’s local committee, said that residents there, numbering some 17,000 people, had feared a large-scale incursion by the Israeli military but had not expected something so violent and destructive.

“The camp is a war zone in all meaning of the word,” Mr. Sbaghi said. “The occupation army is vindictively targeting us.”

“People are terrified,” he added, saying that residents were holed up in their homes throughout the camp.

But Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog, described Jenin over the past two years as “a major hub of terrorism and an Iranian stronghold,” apparently a reference to reports of Iranian-backed, Palestinian militant groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas flooding the area with weapons.

“Most of the terror attacks against Israelis originated from Jenin,” Mr. Herzog wrote on Twitter. “No nation would sit idly by as terrorists strike its citizens.”

A week ago, a rocket was launched from the Jenin area but exploded soon after it took off, according to the military and video footage. While militant groups in the Palestinian coastal territory of Gaza have been launching rockets into Israel for more than 20 years, militant groups in the occupied West Bank have not developed the same capabilities.

An Israeli raid into Jenin on June 19 turned deadly, with at least five Palestinians killed in a gun battle, including a 15-year-old girl, and dozens more Palestinians wounded, according to Palestinian health officials.

Eight members of the Israeli security forces were also wounded in the fighting that day, which broke out after a raid to arrest two Palestinians suspected of terrorist activity turned into lengthy exchanges of fire, according to the Israeli military.

Israeli helicopter gunships were sent into the area for the first time in decades to aid forces trying to extricate armored vehicles that had been disabled by a roadside bomb. Israeli analysts said that the roadside bomb was reminiscent of the kind that Israeli forces encountered in past decades in southern Lebanon.

Residents of the northern West Bank have recently been witnessing an explosive mix of violence. There are attacks on Israelis by armed local Palestinian militias; almost daily arrest raids by the Israeli military; and reprisals by extremist Jewish settlers, who have rampaged through Palestinian villages setting fire to property.

Western-backed Palestinian security forces belonging to the Palestinian Authority have largely stayed out of the hotbeds of militancy in the northern West Bank of late. Their absence, analysts say, suggests that they have lost control and left behind a power vacuum.

Members of the coalition government in Israel led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the most right-wing in the country’s history — have been pressing for a more aggressive military response to the attacks on Israelis.

But the leader of the Israeli opposition, the centrist Yair Lapid, voiced his support for Monday’s operation. “This is a justified step against a terror infrastructure based on accurate and high quality intelligence,” he wrote on Twitter.

This year has proved one of the deadliest so far for Palestinians in the West Bank in more than a decade, with more than 140 Palestinian deaths in the territory over the past six months. Most were killed in armed clashes during military raids, though some were bystanders. This year has also been one of the deadliest in years for Israelis, with nearly 30 killed in Arab attacks.

A day after the June 19 raid in Jenin, Palestinian gunmen killed four Israeli civilians, including a 17-year-old boy, near the Jewish settlement of Eli in the West Bank. The Palestinian gunmen were members of the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamist militant group that seized control in the coastal territory of Gaza in 2007 after winning elections a year earlier.

And a day after that, an Israeli drone strike killed three Palestinian militants in a car who the military said had just shot at an Israeli position in the northern West Bank and had carried out attacks against Jewish settlements in the area.

The killing of the four Israelis at Eli set off waves of reprisals by Israeli extremists who rampaged through Palestinian towns and villages, burning homes, cars and fields.

Raja Abdulrahim, Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.