The Israeli military said it struck and killed three militants on Friday in the occupied West Bank, a rare air strike in the Palestinian territory that has seen growing tensions.
The West Bank, a partly semi-autonomous territory home to the Palestinian Authority, has seen soaring violence by Israeli settlers but has recently avoided Israeli military strikes that have devastated the Gaza Strip since the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas.
Military raids on Palestinian towns in the West Bank are common, but Israel last carried out a strike there in February 2025.
AFP photos showed Israeli soldiers on Friday removing a body from a house under construction on the outskirts of the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
“Three terrorists eliminated in the Jenin area,” the Israeli military said, naming one as Qais Bitawi, whom it described as a Hamas operative in a dismantled Jenin militant network.
The armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, however, said in a statement that Bitawi and the two others killed were its fighters.
It described Bitawi as “one of the most prominent leaders of the Al-Quds Brigades in the West Bank”.
The Israeli military said in a statement that Bitawi had been involved in advancing militant activity “including directing, funding and executing … attacks against Israeli civilians and the security forces”.
It added that Bitawi had “maintained ties with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and with Hamas operatives abroad”.
AFP photos showed Israeli soldiers on Friday removing a body from a house under construction on the outskirts of the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
Friday’s air strike also killed two of his accomplices, the military said, adding that weapons had been found in their vehicle.
In a statement, Hamas denounced the “massacre perpetrated by the occupation forces through an air strike” on Jenin, adding that the attack “will be met only with further anger and confrontation”.
Operational ‘Iron Wall’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz both congratulated Israel’s forces on the operation.
“These are the fruits of the aggressive and proactive policy we are leading in the West Bank: we do not wait for terror – we pursue it, conquer its strongholds and thwart its people,” Katz wrote on X.
The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that Israeli forces had briefly detained its crews after they arrived at the site of the attack, confiscating their medical equipment and ordering them to leave without evacuating any patients.
The military said the Jenin network was dismantled during operation “Iron Wall” – a large-scale campaign launched in early 2025 targeting refugee camps in the northern West Bank, which the military said aimed to crack down on Palestinian armed groups.
As part of the operation, Israeli tanks deployed in Jenin, which is known as a hotbed of Palestinian militancy.
The large-scale operation has caused the displacement of nearly 40,000 people from the camps, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
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Since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, at least 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including several armed fighters, have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian Authority data.
Official Israeli data shows at least 48 Israelis – civilians and soldiers – have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations in the same period.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. The Oslo Accords in the 1990s granted limited self-rule to the Palestinian Authority, whose ruling Fatah movement is a rival to Hamas.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
