JERUSALEM — Four Palestinian militants were killed on Wednesday during an Israeli Army raid in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian health officials, in one of the deadliest confrontations in the territory this year.
The men were among more than 90 Palestinians and two Israeli security officials killed in the West Bank so far in 2022, the biggest spasm of violence there in seven years.
Israeli military raids have surged in the West Bank since March, when the Israeli Army began an operation to curb a wave of Arab attacks in the spring that killed 19 Israelis and foreigners, some of which were perpetrated by Palestinians from the West Bank.
Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers within the West Bank have also increased during the same period, amid rising Palestinian resentment at the increase in Israeli raids; frustration at the entrenchment of the 55-year occupation; and an unwillingness by the Palestinian Authority, the body that administers nearly 40 percent of the West Bank, to crack down on militants operating within its small pockets of control.
The army said it had entered Jenin on Wednesday to arrest two wanted militants, including the brother of a gunman who killed three Israeli civilians outside a bar in Tel Aviv in April. The raid set off an hourslong gun battle as militants in the neighborhood, armed with assault rifles, attempted to block the Israeli incursion.
The Palestinian health ministry later said the brother was among the four people killed and 44 injured during that fighting, an unusually high number. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade — an armed militia affiliated with Fatah, the secular political party that controls the authority — later said that three of the four slain men were members of the militia, and a fourth belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller Islamist group.
A photograph posted to social media on Wednesday showed one of the four wearing the uniform of Palestinian military intelligence, an arm of the Palestinian Authority that coordinates with Israeli counterparts. The commander of military intelligence for the authority, Maj. Gen. Zakaria Musleh, did not respond to requests for comment.
In general, analysts say, the Palestinian Authority’s recent reluctance to take action against armed groups this year is partly rooted in an unwillingness to target individuals with connections to either Fatah or the authority itself.
Senior Israeli officials have regularly criticized the authority in recent weeks for failing to do enough to stamp out militancy in its areas of control, saying Israeli soldiers are forced to take action instead. In turn, authority officials say that the regularity of Israel’s raids are exacerbating the situation, and making it harder for the authority to act without seeming like an arm of the Israeli state.
Founded after the signing of the Oslo accords in the 1990s, the authority and its security forces coordinate with the Israeli Army and police, partly in an effort to build trust ahead of the establishment of a Palestinian state.
But with hopes of statehood all but extinguished, the arrangement increasingly attracts the ire of Palestinians, recent polling showed. Stung by that criticism, some Palestinian security officials have broken ranks over the years, joining the militants they are nominally meant to police.
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s fighting, militants tried to encourage more Palestinian security officials to join them.
