Israel launched its most intense airstrikes on the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades on Monday, and sent hundreds of ground troops into the narrow streets and alleys of the crowded Jenin refugee camp, saying it was trying to root out armed militants after a year of escalating violence there.
The Israeli military said the operation began shortly after 1 a.m. and included several missiles fired by drones. Military officials said the operation was focused on militant targets in the refugee camp, an area of less than a quarter of a square mile abutting the city of Jenin, with about 17,000 residents.
At least eight Palestinians were killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
“The camp is a war zone in the full meaning of the word,” Muhammad Sbaghi, a member of the local committee that helps administer the camp, said after the operation began on Monday.
The military said a drone attack struck a joint operations center used by militants of a group known as the Jenin Brigade in the refugee camp, and that Israeli forces also targeted a facility for weapons production and explosive device storage. Gunfire echoed through the camp as Israeli troops and armored vehicles went in, and the military said they had located and confiscated caches of weapons, hundreds of explosive devices and an improvised rocket launcher.
The Israeli government that took office six months ago is the most right-wing in the country’s history, with ultranationalist ministers who oppose any talks with Palestinian leaders, and it has promised both expanded Jewish settlements in occupied territory and a tougher response to violence. The Palestinian Authority, weakened and viewed as corrupt by many Palestinians, has all but abandoned any effort to police the hotbeds of militancy in the northern West Bank, leaving helpless residents caught in the middle.
The drone strikes were far more limited than the aerial attacks Israel has made on Gaza, but Israel has not used this level of air power against West Bank militants since the second Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the early 2000s. Though the recent violence in the West Bank, including the Jenin camp, has not reached the intensity of that earlier conflict, there are growing fears that the recent tit-for-tat attacks could spiral out of control.
Mr. Sbaghi said that residents had feared a large-scale incursion by the Israeli military but had not expected something so violent. “The occupation army is vindictively targeting us,” he said. “People are terrified,” he added.
Residents of the camp were holed up in their homes, he said. People in Jenin received text messages from Israeli numbers telling them to stay inside, and militants received texts telling them to give themselves up, according to Israeli officials.
Israeli troops and militants who had barricaded themselves in a mosque exchanged gunfire and there was a long standoff that ended with some of the militants being arrested and others escaping. The Israeli military said its forces, acting on intelligence, located in the underground level of the mosque two pits that contained more explosive devices, weapons and other military equipment.
Tensions have escalated in the area recently, with local Palestinian militias waging a series of attacks against Israelis, and extremist Jewish settlers rampaging through Palestinian villages and setting fire to property. There have been almost daily raids by the Israeli military to arrest Palestinians suspected of armed activity.
The killing last month of four Israeli civilians outside a West Bank Jewish settlement by two gunmen from the Islamist militant group Hamas increased pressure on the Israeli government to take tougher military action against armed Palestinians in the northern West Bank, though that attack was not linked to militants from Jenin.
The Jenin area has a decades-long history as a bastion of armed struggle against Israeli rule. Its location in hilly terrain and its relative distance from the centers of Palestinian power and influence in Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Gaza have nurtured its ethos of defiance and reputation for lawlessness.
Israel estimates that there are hundreds of armed Palestinians in the Jenin area. The city is a stronghold of the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad group and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s main rival, which controls Gaza. Israeli military officials say more than 50 shooting attacks have been carried out from the Jenin area against Israeli targets in the past six months.
A spokesman for the Israeli military, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, said the goal of the Israeli operation was “to break the safe-haven mind-set” of the refugee camp. At least 19 people suspected of attacks on Israelis had found shelter there in recent months, according to the military.
Colonel Hecht said the airstrikes were intended to “minimize friction” on the ground and the risk to Israeli troops, adding that the assault would go on for “as long as needed.” Ground forces inside the camp were seizing weapons, he said.
The Israeli news media estimated that about 1,000 ground troops had entered Jenin.
The spokesman for the Palestinian presidency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, denounced the Israeli assault on Jenin as “ a new war crime against our defenseless people,” according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.
“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression,” he said.
The Palestinian health ministry said that in addition to at least eight Palestinians killed, about 50 were wounded, 10 of them gravely. A militant group loosely affiliated with Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian faction that dominates the Palestinian Authority, claimed one of the dead as a member. There was no immediate word on the affiliations of the others.
The chief spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said that as far as Israel could ascertain, those killed were all combatants, attributing that to what he described as the precision of the airstrikes and the minimal payloads of the missiles used.
This year has been one of the deadliest so far for Palestinians in the West Bank in more than a decade, with more than 140 deaths over the past six months. Most were killed in armed clashes during military raids, though some were bystanders. It has also been one of the deadliest years for Israelis in some time, with nearly 30 killed in Arab attacks.
Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general and former national security adviser, said he expected Israel to wrap up the operation quickly, within a few days at most, to try to avoid hostilities spreading to other areas, such as Gaza.
The military also said that the operations center it struck had served as the “eyes and ears” of militant groups, providing camera coverage across Jenin that allowed them to monitor Israeli troop movements, and that the surprise airstrikes at the opening of the assault constituted a significant tactical setback for the gunmen.
Television images on Monday showed Israeli armored bulldozers tearing up roads in Jenin, to search for roadside bombs and neutralize tripwires that trigger the bombs, according to a military official.
The airstrikes were the most intense since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, from 2000 to 2005, which brought suicide bombings in Israeli cities and an Israeli re-invasion of Palestinian cities. It left about 3,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis dead, deeply traumatizing both societies.
Israeli officials said early Monday that they had been in contact with representatives of the Palestinian Authority, the body created in the mid-1990s to exercise limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank. They were also in contact with authorities in neighboring Jordan.
Analysts say the absence of Palestinian Authority security forces in West Bank militant centers suggests that those forces may have lost control and left a power vacuum.
The operation on Monday appeared to have broad political support in Israel, as the opposition leader, the centrist Yair Lapid, voiced his backing for it.
“This is a justified step against a terror infrastructure based on accurate and high-quality intelligence,” he wrote on Twitter.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced a different kind of pressure on Monday, as thousands of people gathered at Israel’s main international airport, some blocking traffic or scuffling with the police, to protest his plan to weaken the judiciary. The prime minister had put the plan on hold in the face of widespread opposition, but talks seeking a compromise broke down last month.
Tensions in the Jenin area heightened a week ago when a rocket was launched toward an Israeli community from the Jenin area. It exploded soon after it took off, according to the military and video footage.
While militant groups in Gaza have been launching rockets into Israel for more than 20 years, groups in the West Bank so far have not.
Another event that increased frictions in the area was an Israeli military operation in Jenin on June 19 that turned deadly, with at least five Palestinians killed in a gun battle and dozens more wounded, according to Palestinian health officials. One of those killed was a 15-year-old girl.
Eight members of the Israeli security forces were wounded in the fighting that day, when a raid to arrest two Palestinians suspected of terrorist activity turned into lengthy exchanges of fire, according to the Israeli military. Israeli helicopter gunships were sent into the area for the first time in decades to aid forces trying to extricate armored vehicles that had been disabled by a roadside bomb. Israeli analysts said that the bomb was reminiscent of the kind that Israeli forces encountered in past decades in southern Lebanon.
Raja Abdulrahim, Gabby Sobelman, Iyad Abuheweila and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
