The attack in Kafr Dan, near Jenin, comes as the Israeli army intensifies its deadly attacks in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces killed six Palestinians in a raid in the village of Kafr Dan near Jenin in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, as Israel steps up attacks on the territory amid the war against Gaza.
An Israeli special forces unit entered the village on Tuesday and besieged a house before bombing it, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
The six men killed were aged 21 to 32, according to the Health Ministry. One of them, Ahmad Smoudi, was the brother of a 12-year-old child who was fatally shot by Israeli forces in Jenin in 2022.
The Jenin battalion of the al-Quds Brigades – the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad – said earlier on Tuesday that it was engaged in “fierce” fighting with Israeli troops in Kafr Dan.
The Israeli army said it carried out an “anti-terrorism” operation in the village, killing four armed Palestinians. The army added that it used attack helicopters in the assault and suffered no casualties.
Israeli forces killed four Palestinians west of Ramallah on Monday and three others on Friday in Jenin.
The Israeli army has regularly carried out deadly raids in the West Bank in recent years – a trend that intensified with the start of the war on Gaza.
According to Palestinian health authorities, Israel has killed 544 Palestinians, including 133 children, in the West Bank since October 2023, when violence erupted in Gaza. Israel also arrested thousands of Palestinians during this period.
Palestinians in the West Bank have also faced violent attacks from Israeli settlers, who have attacked farmers and raided Palestinian towns in recent months, often under the protection of the Israeli army.
Rawhi Fattouh of the Palestinian National Council said Israeli raids in the West Bank were a “continuation of massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide targeting the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
“This racist (Israeli) government is seeking by all means to explode the situation in the West Bank and the region and to transform the conflict into a religious and ideological fight that would plunge the region into a furnace of violence, murders and massacres. » Fattouh said in a statement.
He called on the international community to intervene and “suppress this madness”.
