Four Palestinians, including a 16-year-old boy, were killed on Thursday (March 16th) in Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank, during an incursion by Israeli forces, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Eighteen people with gunshot wounds were also hospitalized, four of them in serious condition, the ministry said.
“Security forces are currently carrying out an operation in the camp [de réfugiés palestiniens] of Jenin », announced the army in a press release published around 2:40 p.m. Paris time, without further details. This attack comes as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to be sucked into a new inextricable spiral of violence since the inauguration, at the end of December, of the most right-wing government in the history of Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Over the past year, the army had managed to contain a nascent insurgency in the Jenin camp and the old city of Nablus, but the insurgents in these neighborhoods fortified them and became better armed. Israeli forces are now struggling to enter without causing many deaths. Since January, they have multiplied raids at peak times.
Since the beginning of the year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of eighty-four Palestinians and an Israeli policeman, as well as a Ukrainian woman, according to a report that Agence France-Presse made from official Israeli and Palestinian sources.