Three Palestinians died this morning in violent clashes with the Israeli Army during another raid in the Jenin refugee camp, in the north of the occupied West Bank.
The exchange of fire caused three Palestinian deaths and eight injuries, as confirmed by the Palestinian Ministry of Health; no casualties among Israeli troops.
“Overnight, soldiers operated in two different places in the Jenin camp to locate and confiscate illegal weapons,” an Israeli military spokesman said in a statement.
According to the Army, “Palestinian assailants fired heavily at the soldiers and threw explosive devices at them,” for which they “responded with live fire” and “neutralized” them.
After a first exchange of fire, the troops advanced to a second location where they identified a “suspicious vehicle” where “armed assailants” also shot at the soldiers, who again “responded with live fire to neutralize them,” according to the military report.
Inside the vehicle, the soldiers located two M-16 rifles, a “Carlo” machine gun, loaded ammunition magazines and a military vest.
As a result of an increase in attacks in Israel at the end of March -six that left 18 dead-, the Israeli Army intensified the raids in various points of the occupied West Bank, in which more than 50 Palestinians have already died and more than 550 have been arrested as “terrorism suspects,” according to the military count.
Much of these often violent raids and detainees have been in the Jenin refugee camp, one of the West Bank’s most unemployed and poorest places and the center of the Palestinian militia movement.
According to the Israeli Army, the Jenin area is the “greatest focus of terrorism” in the area and “more than 50% of the terrorist threats to Israel have been detected there.
Those responsible for most of the attacks committed in Israel since March came from Jenin.