BREAKING: Many Causalities As Israel Launches Major Military Operation In Palestine
Israel launched what appeared to be a major military operation in the West Bank early Monday.
It deployed hundreds of troops into Palestinian territory and conducted drone strikes on what it said were militant strongholds in and around Jenin.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least seven Palestinians were killed in the strikes with dozens more injured, DailyMail reports.
“There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground,” Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, told AFP.
“Several houses and sites have been bombed… smoke is rising from everywhere.”
The Israeli incursion, which resembles the wide-scale deployments carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago, was described as an ‘extensive counterterrorism effort’ by the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The operation saw reinforced bulldozers, armoured vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles scythe into Jenin backed up by hundreds of Israeli soldiers.
Palestinian gunmen wearing balaclavas fired back at the soldiers as sirens wailed.
It comes at a time of growing domestic pressure in Israel for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers – including a shooting attack last week that killed four people.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.
Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis who live in settlements considered illegal under international law.
The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it occupied in the Six-Day War and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.
