At least 18 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
The Israeli military said its warplanes carried out the attack Thursday in coordination with Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet.
The army said in a later statement that it had targeted Hamas’s infrastructure chief in Tulkarem.
The Palestinian group did not immediately comment on the Israeli military’s claims.
A camp official, Faisal Salama, told the AFP news agency that the strike was carried out with an F-16 fighter.
Footage verified by Tel Aviv Tribune’s Sanad fact-checking agency showed scenes of devastation in the camp, located northwest of Nablus in the northern West Bank.
The area was filled with huge piles of wreckage and fires had broken out. Rescuers could be seen rushing to the injured victims for medical treatment.
Israeli military raids and attacks have increased in the occupied West Bank since Israel launched its war in the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
Between October 7 last year and the end of September, 695 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, according to a tally by the United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA).
The vast majority of people were killed by the Israeli army, while a dozen were killed by Israeli settlers, OCHA said.
Reporting from Amman, Jordan, in the early hours of Friday, Tel Aviv Tribune’s Nour Odeh said the attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp was “the largest and deadliest airstrike we have seen in the occupied West Bank for more than 20 years.
“Even by the standards of the Second Intifada, this was a very large and very deadly strike against an impoverished and densely populated refugee camp,” Odeh reported.
The Tulkarem refugee camp is home to more than 21,000 people, living in an area of just 0.18 square kilometers (0.11 square miles), according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (PDF).
Odeh added that reports of the attack continued to come in “because the hospitals were overwhelmed.”
“An entire building was razed,” she said. “And the paramedics are still struggling to make sure that they have recovered all (the) bodies and that there are no survivors under the rubble.”
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack on the refugee camp as a “heinous crime” against civilians.
In a statement shared by Wafa news agency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the deadly attack was “part of a broader pattern of genocide against the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
Last month, a UN expert warned that Israel had intensified its military attack on the northern West Bank, leading to a “dangerous escalation”.
“The writing is on the wall and we cannot continue to ignore it. There is growing evidence that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s unlimited control,” said Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. in a press release.
She noted that “systematic air and ground attacks” in the Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Tubas regions – and in refugee camps in particular – had intensified in recent months.
Israel, Albanese said, is “targeting Gaza and the West Bank simultaneously, as part of an overall process of elimination, replacement and territorial expansion.”
More than 41,700 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since October.
In recent weeks, Israel has also launched air and ground attacks in Lebanon as a year of cross-border shooting between Israeli forces and the Lebanese group Hezbollah intensified last month.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by Israel’s continued bombardment of the country, while thousands have been killed and injured.