Israel’s military stormed a mosque in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, where it said weapons were being stored, and engaged in gun battles that left at least five Palestinians dead, including a young militant commander who Israel says was responsible for attacks against Israeli civilians.
It was the second straight day of an Israeli incursion into the northern West Bank, focused in and around the cities of Tulkarm and Jenin, involving columns of armored vehicles, fleets of drones and hundreds of troops. The raids are Israel’s biggest military actions in the West Bank in more than a year.
The commander killed in Thursday’s fighting, Muhammad Jaber, who died in a clash in Tulkarm, led the local branch of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which confirmed his death. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, like its ally, Hamas, receives financial support, weapons and training from Iran, according to the U.S. State Department.
The raid in the West Bank is an escalation along a third front for Israel, in addition to the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and the increased air attacks across its northern border with Lebanon against the militant group Hezbollah, which is also backed by Iran.
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said 17 people had been killed in total in the raids across the West Bank that began before dawn on Wednesday, without specifying whether militants were among them. The Israel military said that 16 militants had been killed across the West Bank.
Residents of Tulkarm and the surrounding area on Thursday described hunkering down in their homes, with internet and telephone services down, afraid to venture into streets that were watched over by Israeli snipers perched on rooftops. Riyad Awad, the head of the city council in Tulkarm, said that parts of the city — and all of Nur Shams, a neighboring community — were without water and sewage service.
Israeli bulldozers ripped up roads to unearth improvised explosive devices. Troops entered people’s homes, in what the military described as searches for weapons, militants and vantage points for watching over the city.
The Israeli military says its operation in the West Bank is targeting Palestinian militant strongholds. Israeli officials have told the United States that the operation was likely to last at least through Friday, a senior U.S. official said. It was not clear whether the United States had received prior notice of the operation.
Israeli forces had repeatedly staged smaller raids in both cities in recent months as the conflict escalated in the West Bank, where about three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation. 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.
The exact circumstances of the deaths of the five in Tulkarm on Thursday morning were not completely clear, with differing accounts that The New York Times could not independently verify.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said Mr. Jaber and four other militants were exchanging fire with Israeli troops from within a mosque and near a mosque before they were killed by Israeli forces.
In a statement confirming 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 after Mr. Jaber had been killed, its fighters detonated an explosive device and shot at Israeli forces, causing “direct injuries.”
Faisal Salameh, head of the services committee in the part of Tulkarm that originated as a refugee camp, said that Mr. Jaber and the others had been killed in a strike around 5 a.m. while they were hiding in a home next to a mosque. He said the Israeli forces took Mr. Jaber’s body, along with the bodies of two others killed, and detained a man whose leg had been broken.
In addition to his role with Islamic Jihad, Mr. Jaber also commanded a loose collective of militants in Tulkarm, including the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Israeli military accused him in a statement of being involved in “numerous terror attacks,” including the murder of an Israeli civilian in June.
Mr. Jaber, a man in his mid-20s who used the nom de guerre Abu Shujaa, or Father of the Brave, gained a kind of cult status in April, after the Israeli military announced that it had killed him during a raid. Three days later, he emerged alive at the funeral of other Palestinians killed during that same raid, to joyous shouts from residents.
Gheith Shawesh, a 17-year-old resident of Nur Shams, lamented Mr. Jaber’s death, saying that people across the West Bank were “angry and sad” about his killing.
He called the raid the “most aggressive” on Nur Shams in years. He said that Israeli forces were blowing off the doors of homes and searching them, rounding up suspects and holding them in seized shops, and cutting up the tarps that hang over some alleyways, concealing militants from Israeli drones overhead.
Explosions were also heard on Thursday in Jenin, where Israeli troops were operating in the eastern part of the city, Wafa reported. The Palestinian Red Crescent said that it had lost contact with the emergency medical services there because communications were down.
Mohammad Al-Sayed, a member of the Jenin city council, said that most communications to the city were down and that movement on the street was being prevented. “The situation is very dangerous, everyone is afraid,” he said.
Raja Abdulrahim, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Rami Nazzal contributed reporting.
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