Israeli airstrike on West Bank Tulkarem camp kills at least 18: Ministry | Israel-Palestine Conflicts News

At least 18 people were killed when an Israeli plane attacked the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

The Israeli military said its warplanes carried out the attack on Thursday in cooperation with Israel’s internal security unit, the Shin Bet.

The army said in a recent statement that it had targeted the head of Hamas’s infrastructure in Tulkarem.

The Palestinian Authority did not immediately comment on the Israeli army’s request.

The commander of the camp, Faisal Salama, told AFP that the strike was carried out by an F-16.

Images verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad showed scenes of devastation at the camp, located northwest of Nablus in the northern West Bank.

The area was full of piles of garbage and fires had broken out. Rescuers could be seen rushing injured victims to get medical help.

Attacks and attacks by the Israeli military have extended to the occupied West Bank since Israel launched its war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023.

Between October 7 of last year and the end of September, 695 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, according to figures from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (OCHA).

Most of the people were killed by Israeli soldiers, while a dozen were killed by Israeli settlers, OCHA said.

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, in the early hours of Friday, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp was “the biggest and worst air strike we have seen in the populated West Bank for more than 20 years”.

“Even by the standards of the second Intifada, this was the biggest, deadliest strike in a crowded, poor 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 UN’s Palestine Refugee Agency (PDF).

Odeh added that information about the attack was still coming in “because hospitals are overwhelmed”.

“The whole building was renovated,” he explained. “Even the emergency services are still struggling to make sure that they have all recovered [the] corpses, and that there are no survivors under the rubble there.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesman condemned the attack on the refugee camp as a “heinous crime” against civilians.

In a statement sent by Wafa news agency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the deadly attack was “part of a wider pattern of killing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip”.

Last month, a UN expert warned that Israel had stepped up its military offensive in the northern West Bank, leading to a “dangerous escalation”.

“The writing is on the wall, we cannot continue to ignore it. There is growing evidence that no Palestinian is safe under Israeli control,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special secretary for human rights in the Palestinian territories, in a statement.

He noted that “organized air and ground attacks” in the areas of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Tubas – and especially in refugee camps – have intensified in the past few months.

Israel, Albanese said, “targets Gaza and the West Bank at the same time, as part of the 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.

Israel in recent weeks has also launched air and ground strikes in Lebanon as a year of cross-border firefights between Israeli forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah group escalated last month.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by Israel’s continued bombing of the country, while thousands have been killed and injured.