The attack in Kafr Dan, near Jenin, comes as the Israeli army intensifies its deadly attacks in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces killed six Palestinians during a raid on the village of Kafr Dan near Jenin in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, as Israel intensifies its attacks on the territory amid the war in Gaza.
An Israeli special forces unit entered the village on Tuesday and laid siege to a house before bombing it, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
The six men killed were between 21 and 32 years old, according to the Ministry of Health. One of them, Ahmad Smoudi, was the brother of a 12-year-old boy who was shot dead by Israeli forces in Jenin in 2022.
The Jenin battalion of the Al-Quds Brigades – the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad – had said earlier on Tuesday that it was involved in “fierce” fighting with Israeli troops in Kafr Dan.
The Israeli military said it carried out a “counterterrorism” operation in the village, killing four Palestinian gunmen. The military added that it used attack helicopters in the assault and suffered 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 carrying out deadly attacks in the West Bank in recent years, a trend that intensified with the start of the war in Gaza.
According to Palestinian health authorities, Israel has killed 544 Palestinians, including 133 children, in the West Bank since October 2023, when violence broke out in Gaza. 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 attacked farmers and raided Palestinian towns in recent months, often under the protection of the Israeli army.
Rawhi Fattouh of the Palestinian National Council said the Israeli incursions into the West Bank were a “continuation of the massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
“This racist [Israeli] “The government is seeking all means to detonate the situation in the West Bank and the region and turn the conflict into a religious and ideological struggle that would lead the region into a furnace of violence, murders and massacres,” Fattouh said in a statement.
He called on the international community to intervene and “quell this madness.”
