At least 18 people have been killed in an Israeli air attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
The Israeli military said that its fighter jets had carried out the attack on Thursday in coordination with Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet.
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The army said in a later statement that it had targeted the head of Hamas’s infrastructure in Tulkarem.
The Palestinian group did not immediately comment on the Israeli military’s claim.
A camp official, Faisal Salama, told the AFP news agency that the strike had been carried out with an F-16 fighter.
Footage verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency showed scenes of devastation in the camp, located northwest of Nablus in the north of the West Bank.
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The area was filled with massive piles of wreckage and fires had broken out. Rescuers could be seen rushing injured victims to receive medical care.
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Israeli military raids and attacks have surged across 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 a tally from 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, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp was “the largest and deadliest air strike that we’ve seen in the occupied West Bank for over 20 years”.
“Even by the second Intifada standards, this was a very large, very deadly strike on a densely populated, impoverished refugee camp,” Odeh reported.
The Tulkarem refugee camp is home to more than 21,000 people, living in an area of only 0.18 square kilometres (0.11 square miles), according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (PDF).
Odeh added that information on the attack was still coming in “because hospitals have been overwhelmed”.
“An entire building was levelled,” she explained. “And the paramedics are still struggling to make sure that they’ve recovered all [the] bodies, and that there are no survivors under the rubble there.”
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 the Wafa news agency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the deadly assault was “part of a broader pattern of genocide against the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip”.
Last month, a UN expert warned that Israel had ramped up its military assault 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 mounting evidence that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s unfettered control,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a statement.
She noted that “systematic aerial and ground attacks” in the areas of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Tubas — and in refugee camps in particular — had intensified over the past few 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.
Israel in recent weeks also launched aerial and ground attacks in Lebanon as a year of cross-border firings between Israeli forces and the Lebanese group Hezbollah escalated 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.
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