At least 13 Palestinians were killed in raid by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, Israeli and Palestinian forces said Saturday.
Israel said its troops “eliminated 10 terrorists” and made eight arrests during the raid on Nur Shams refugee camp, which began early Friday. The Islamic Jihad militant group said three of its members died.
Tulkarm Brigades group, which includes forces from numerous Palestinian factions, said its fighters exchanged weapons fire with Israeli forces on Saturday.
At least three drones were seen hovering above Nur Shams while Israeli armored vehicles were rolling into the camp.
AFP journalists heard bursts of gunfire, saw bodies lying in the street and houses destroyed by Israeli drones.
The Israeli military said the fighting lasted more than 40 hours and that eight of its soldiers and a police officer were wounded.
A teenage boy also died from gunshot wounds during the Israeli storming of the camp Friday, Palestinian authorities said.
The Palestinian health ministry told AFP it had confirmed 11 injured during the raid, seven of them "wounded by live gunshots." It said a paramedic was shot while trying to get to the wounded was among them.
The health ministry said medics had been alerted to "a number of killed and injured" inside the camp but said the Israeli army was "denying them access to tend to the wounded," which an AFP journalist confirmed seeing.
FILE - Israeli military vehicles drive during an operation in the nearby Nur Shams refugee camp, near the West Bank town of Tulkarm, April 20, 2024.
Gunshots were heard and soldiers conducted door-to-door raids, the journalist said.
Israeli forces say their frequent raids target Palestinian militants, but civilians are often caught in the crossfire.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, a Palestinian ambulance driver was killed while evacuating the wounded from an attack by Israeli settlers near the village of Al-Sawiya, south of the city of Nablus.
The Palestinian health ministry said the 50-year-old driver was killed by Israeli gunfire. There was no comment from the Israeli military.
Israel strikes Rafah
An Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah late Friday, killed nine people, six of them children, according to hospital authorities Saturday.
Another overnight Israeli air assault struck the city of 2.3 million people on the border with Egypt that is hosting more than a million refugees from other parts of the enclave devastated by the Israeli offensive.
A young Palestinian wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is brought to the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, April 20, 2024.
The international community has called for Israel’s restraint on Rafah, and so far, Israel has not acted on its threats to launch an offensive on the city. It has not backed off its original position, however, that it intends to carry out a military offensive there. Israel maintains many of the remaining Hamas militants are holed up there.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday during a news conference at the G7 meeting in Italy that the Biden administration "cannot support a major military operation in Rafah."
He said a major military operation on the city would have "terrible consequences" for the civilians remaining there.
"First, there are currently somewhere around 1.4 million people in Rafah — many of them displaced from other parts of Gaza. It's imperative that people are able to get out of the way of any conflict, and doing so is a monumental task for which we have yet to see a plan," the top U.S. diplomat said.
In central Gaza another strike hit a house in the urban refugee camp of Bureji, killing at least one man and injuring two others, according to authorities at the al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah. An Associated Press journalist witnessed the casualties.
The bodies of 37 people killed by Israeli strikes Saturday were brought to hospitals in Gaza. Another 68 injured people were admitted to hospitals in the past 24 hours, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday.
The latest figures bring the overall Palestinian death toll from the Israel-Hamas war to at least 34,049, and the number of wounded to 76,901. Two thirds of the overall numbers have been children and women, according to the Hamas-run health authorities.
Israel launched its offensive in response to the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli figures. Militants also took about 250 people as hostages. Hamas has been designated a terror group by the U.S., U.K., EU and others.
In November, more than 100 hostages were released as part of a four-day pause in the fighting. Israel says about 130 hostages remain in captivity, but one-quarter of them are dead. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., U.K., EU and others.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.