Israeli forces have killed six Palestinians during a raid in the village of Kafr Dan near Jenin in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has said, as Israel intensifies its attacks on the territory amid the war on Gaza.

An Israeli special forces unit entered the village on Tuesday and besieged a home before shelling it, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

The six slain men were aged 21 to 32, according to the Health Ministry. One of them, Ahmad Smoudi, was the brother of a 12-year-old child who was fatally shot by Israeli forces in Jenin in 2022.

The Jenin battalion of the al-Quds Brigades – the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – had said earlier on Tuesday that it was engaged in “fierce” fighting with Israeli troops in Kafr Dan.

The Israeli military said it carried out a “counterterrorism” operation in the village, killing four armed Palestinians. The army added that it used attack helicopters in the assault and sustained no casualties.

Israeli forces killed four Palestinians west of Ramallah on Monday and three others in Jenin on Friday.

The Israeli military has been regularly conducting deadly raids in the West Bank over the past few years – a trend that escalated with the start of the war on Gaza.

According to Palestinian health authorities, Israel has killed 544 Palestinians, including 133 children, in the West Bank since October 2023 when the violence in Gaza broke out. Israel has also detained thousands of Palestinians during that period.

Palestinians in the West Bank have also faced violent attacks from Israeli settlers, who have assaulted farmers and raided Palestinian towns in the past months, often under the protection of the Israeli military.

Rawhi Fattouh, Palestinian National Council, said the Israeli raids in the West Bank was a “continuation of the massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide targeting the Palestinian people in Gaza”.

“This racist [Israeli] government is looking through all means to detonate the situation in the West Bank and the region and to turn the conflict into a religious, ideological fight that would bring the region into a furnace of violence, killing and massacres,” Fattouh said in a statement.

He called on the international community to intervene and “quell this madness”.

Source: Al Jazeera 

BDST: 0854 HRS, JUN 12, 2024
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