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Israel’s large-scale military operations in the occupied West Bank entered a second day on Thursday, with the Israeli military saying it had killed five militants, including a young commander wanted for attacks against Israeli civilians.
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said 17 people had been killed in all in raids across the territory that began before dawn on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Israeli military was raiding dozens of homes in the city of Tulkarm and had closed entrances to the nearby Nur Shams neighborhood, according to the news agency.
Israel’s military said that among the five killed on Thursday in Tulkarm were the commander, Muhammad Jaber, who was known as Abu Shujaa. Mr. Jaber led the local branch of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which dominates the Tulkarm camp. Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirmed his death.
Mr. Jaber, widely known by his nom de guerre, Abu Shujaa, meaning Father of the Brave, also led a collective of all the militant factions in that area, including the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Israeli military accused him in a statement of carrying out “numerous terror attacks,” including the murder of an Israeli civilian in June.
Mr. Jaber gained a kind of cult status in the spring when the Israeli military announced that it had killed him during a raid on the Tulkarm camp. Three days later, he emerged alive at the funeral of other Palestinians killed during that same raid, to joyous shouts from camp residents.
The exact circumstances of the deaths of the five in Tulkarm were disputed. The Israeli military said they were killed in gun battles inside a mosque.
Faisal Salameh, head of the services committee of Tulkarm camp, said that five people there had been killed in a strike around 5 a.m. Thursday, including Mr. Jaber. He said they had been attacked while hiding in a home next to a mosque and that there had been no clashes.
In its statement confirming the Mr. Jaber’s death, Islamic Jihad said that he had been killed after a “heroic confrontation” with Israeli forces. Its local branch in Tulkarm said in a separate statement that in response to Mr. Jaber’s killing, its fighters detonated an explosive device and shot at them, causing “direct injuries.”
The New York Times could not verify the accounts.
The Israeli forces took Mr. Jabr’s body, along with the bodies of two others killed, and detained a man whose leg had been broken, Mr. Salameh said.
Explosions were also heard in Jenin, where Israeli troops were operating in the eastern part of the city, Wafa reported. A spokesman for the Israeli military said Jenin and Tulkarm had become militant strongholds.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said that it had lost contact with the emergency medical services in Jenin because communications were down.
Riyad Awad, the head of the city council in Tulkarm, said the Israeli military was raiding his city, along with two neighborhoods known as Tulkarm camp and Nur Shams camp, for a second day, and many residents were unable to leave their homes. Using bulldozers, he said, Israeli forces “are ripping up the streets and they cut water mains, so we had to turn off the water.” Parts of the city and the entirety of Nur Shams were without water and sewage service, he said.
The Israeli military often uses bulldozers in the West Bank to counter what it says is the threat of improvised explosives placed under the streets.
Israeli forces on Wednesday began one of their broadest campaigns in the West Bank in more than a year, hundreds of troops accompanied by drones began pushing into parts of Jenin and Tulkarm as part of what the Israeli military described as the first stages of an operation to root out militants. Israeli raids had been increasing in recent months in the West Bank, where three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation.
Residents said Israeli forces were putting up roadblocks made of dirt mounds Wednesday afternoon, appearing to set up for a longer operation than past incursions during which they would make arrests and withdraw within hours. The Palestinian governor of Jenin said on Wednesday that the unusually fierce Israeli operations this week had left residents terrorized and anxious.
The activity in the West Bank is an escalation along a third front for Israel, in addition to its war in Gaza and the increased air attacks across its northern border with Lebanon against the militant group Hezbollah.
More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, both in military strikes and at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers, according to the United Nations.
Raja Abdulrahim and Rami Nazzal contributed reporting.
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Steven Erlanger, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, traveled to the West Bank earlier this year. While there, he interviewed Muhammad Jaber, known as Abu Shujaa, a militant commander who was killed by Israeli forces on Thursday morning. Here are excerpts from his article, published in July.
The alleys are cast in permanent semidarkness, covered by black nylon tarpaulins to hide the Palestinian fighters there from Israeli drones overhead. Green Hamas flags and banners commemorating “martyrs” hang from the buildings, many badly damaged during Israeli raids and airstrikes to try to tamp down a growing militancy in the territory.
This is not Gaza or a traditional Hamas stronghold. It is a refugee camp in Tulkarm, a town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the relatively moderate Palestinian faction of Fatah had long held sway.
I recently met a local commander of these young militants, Muhammad Jaber, 25, in one of those dusty, shattered alleyways. One of Israel’s most wanted men, he and other fighters like him say they have switched allegiances from the relatively moderate Fatah faction, which dominates the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to more radical groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
Asked what lesson he had taken from the war in Gaza, Mr. Jaber paused for a moment to think.
“Patience,” he said. “And strength. And courage.”
Mr. Jaber, widely known by his nom de guerre, Abu Shujaa, meaning Father of the Brave, commands the local branch of Islamic Jihad, which dominates the Tulkarm camp. He also leads a collective of all the militant factions in that area, including the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade there, which is known as the Khatiba. He switched from Fatah, he said, because it was Islamic Jihad and Hamas who were taking the fight to Israel to end the occupation and create Palestine by force of arms.
Mr. Jaber gained a kind of cult status in the spring when the Israeli military announced that it had killed him during a raid on the Tulkarm camp. Three days later, he emerged alive at the funeral of other Palestinians killed during that same raid, to joyous shouts from camp residents.
We met in an alley with streets stripped to sand by Israeli bulldozers, before ducking into a storefront to avoid being sighted by drones. Thin and bearded, wearing a black Hugo Boss T-shirt and a Sig Sauer pistol on his hip, Mr. Jaber was watched by six bodyguards. Some were armed with M16 and M4 rifles with full magazines and optical sights.
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The World Food Program said it is suspending deliveries of aid in Gaza after one of its humanitarian teams was hit by gunfire this week as it approached an Israeli military checkpoint.
In a statement, the United Nations agency said none of its employees were injured during the shooting on Tuesday night, which occurred after a convoy of its trucks had delivered assistance to central Gaza. The agency said one of its vehicles had been hit by 10 bullets — five on the driver’s side — a few yards from the Israeli security post at the Wadi Gaza bridge.
The statement did not assign responsibility for the shooting, but it said Tuesday’s attack was not the first time a W.F.P. team had come under attack while nearing an Israeli checkpoint in Gaza — even after receiving permission to approach. As a result, it said it was “pausing the movement of its employees in Gaza until further notice.”
“This is totally unacceptable and the latest in a series of unnecessary security incidents that have endangered the lives of W.F.P.’s team in Gaza,” Cindy McCain, the agency’s executive director, said in the statement, which was released Wednesday.
She demanded that Israeli officials take immediate action to ensure the safety of humanitarian workers delivering aid in Gaza and to improve the system by which aid agencies coordinate their movements with Israeli forces. “The current de-confliction system is failing, and this cannot go on any longer,” Ms. McCain said.
Earlier this week, the agency’s main operating hub in Deir al Balah, in the central part of the territory, had to relocate after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area. Last week, amid ongoing Israeli military operations, five W.F.P. community kitchens were evacuated and the agency lost access to the only aid warehouse that it was still operating in central Gaza, the statement said.
The pause in aid deliveries comes at a perilous time for humanitarian efforts and the Palestinians in Gaza who depend on them. As Israel’s military offensive nears its 11th month, nearly half a million people in Gaza face starvation, experts have warned.
In April, an Israeli drone strike killed seven workers with the World Central Kitchen aid group. The organization resumed its work after a brief pause and said in June it had delivered more than 50 million meals in Gaza since the war began.
Israeli military officials have said the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy was a “grave mistake” and cited a series of failures, including a breakdown in communication and violations of the military’s operating procedures.
Adding to the humanitarian concerns, a 10-month old child was diagnosed with polio this month, the first confirmed case of the disease in Gaza in a quarter-century. UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, is hoping to start a campaign to vaccinate children in Gaza as early as this weekend, and has asked Israel to pause military operations to allow it to take place.
