TULKARM, West Bank: Israeli forces killed five Palestinians in an overnight raid in a village near the city of Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry and the Israeli military said on Saturday.
The health ministry said it had identified four of the five who died during the raid in Deir Al-Ghusun. Israeli forces took some of the dead bodies, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa and a Reuters reporter at the scene.
The Israeli military said an officer from a special police unit was wounded in the operation and hospitalized. It said its forces retaliated using live ammunition and shoulder-fired missiles after they were fired on.
Saturday’s operation near the flashpoint city of Tulkarm was the latest in a series of clashes in the occupied West Bank between Israeli forces and Palestinians that has been escalating for more than two years but which has picked up in intensity since the Hamas-led attack on Israel last October.
According to Palestinian Health Ministry records, 492 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers in the West Bank or East Jerusalem since Oct. 7. Many have been armed fighters but stone-throwing youths and uninvolved civilians have also been killed.
Palestinians want the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, as the core of an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
US-backed talks to reach an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled for the past decade but the Gaza war has raised pressure for a revival of efforts to reach a two-state solution.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s seven-month-old assault on the Gaza Strip, say health officials in the Hamas-ruled enclave. The war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and abducting 252 others, of whom 132 are believed to remain in captivity in Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israeli forces kill five Palestinians in overnight raid near West Bank’s Tulkarm
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Israeli forces kill five Palestinians in overnight raid near West Bank’s Tulkarm
- The health ministry said it had identified four of the five who died during the raid in Deir Al-Ghusun
- The Israeli military said an officer from a special police unit was wounded in the operation and hospitalized
Thousands stage pro-Gaza rally in Istanbul
- Thousands joined a New Year’s Day rally for Gaza in Istanbul Thursday, waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and calling for an end to the violence in the tiny war-torn territory
ISTANBUL: Thousands joined a New Year’s Day rally for Gaza in Istanbul Thursday, waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and calling for an end to the violence in the tiny war-torn territory.
Demonstrators gathered in freezing temperatures under cloudless blue skies to march to the city’s Galata Bridge for a rally under the slogan: “We won’t remain silent, we won’t forget Palestine,” an AFP reporter at the scene said.
More than 400 civil society organizations were present at the rally, one of whose organizers was Bilal Erdogan, the youngest son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Police sources and Anadolou state news agency said some 500,000 people had joined the march at which there were speeches and a performance by Lebanese-born singer Maher Zain of his song “Free Palestine.”
“We are praying that 2026 will bring goodness for our entire nation and for the oppressed Palestinians,” said Erdogan, who chairs the board of the Ilim Yayma Foundation, an educational charity that was one of the organizers of the march.
Turkiye has been one of the most vocal critics of the war in Gaza and helped broker a recent ceasefire that halted the deadly war waged by Israel in response to Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7, 2023.
But the fragile October 10 ceasefire has not stopped the violence with more than more than 400 Palestinians killed since it took hold.
