Awad said “a thousand Israeli soldiers” entered the camp in the early hours, with bulldozers rolling on Seka Street and partially demolishing several buildings. An airstrike destroyed the Freedom Theater, he said, and he saw one boy with a severed leg.
“His brother was next to him, crying out for him,” he said.
The operation bore hallmarks of Israel’s regular missions against Islamist factions in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip — featuring airstrikes, no fixed end time and substantial military resources.
Israeli officials publicly assured Palestinian leaders that they were not directing the attacks at the Palestinian Authority, which has security control of that section of the West Bank under the terms to the 1990s Oslo accords.
“We are not there to take over. This operation is not against the Palestinian Authority and is not against its security organizations, which have also found it difficult to operate in the Jenin refugee camp,” Adm. Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman, said in a radio interview. “We are focused solely on this bottleneck, to dismantle it.”
But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the attacks “a new war crime against our defenseless people,” according to a spokesman.
Rival militant groups throughout the occupied territories expressed defiance. “The resistance in all arenas will not allow the enemy to invade our people in Jenin or to single them out,” a coalition of factions in Gaza said in a statement.
The IDF also said it was boosting air defense readiness in southern Israel in the event of rocket fire from Gaza.
Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militant group that Western nations regard as a terrorist organization, said in a statement that it would not be deterred by the strikes. “Jenin will not surrender,” said the organization, which has a following in the city.
Both Egypt and Jordan, Arab neighbors that have relations with Israel, condemned the operation and called on the international community to intervene. In a sign of regional tensions, Israeli planes conducted airstrikes near Homs, Syria, on Sunday, according to the Syrian army, and an antiaircraft missile that was reportedly launched from the area exploded over central Israel.
The escalating violence has raised fears about a return to the bloody warfare of the early 2000s that killed thousands across the region.
The decades-old Jenin camp has one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty among refugee camps in the West Bank, according to the United Nations. Thousands of residents of the camp are on Israeli watch lists, making them ineligible for work permits.
Violence has surged this year in Israel and the occupied territories. Nearly half of the roughly 140 Palestinians killed by Israel in the West Bank between Jan. 1 and late June were affiliated with militant groups, the Associated Press reported. But in several instances, children have been killed as Israeli security forces adopted increasingly aggressive tactics. In March, a 14-year-old boy was killed during a raid in central Jenin, according to a Washington Post investigation. In June, a 15-year-old girl was killed in another raid.
At least 23 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians as of June, according to a Post tally of media reports and Israeli government figures. Last month, Hamas gunmen killed four Israelis at a gas station outside the Eli, a small hilltop Israeli settlement. In response, groups of masked settlers rampaged through Palestinian villages over several days, burning cars and houses. One resident, a Palestinian American, was killed.
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Masih reported from Seoul. Sufian Taha in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza contributed to this report.
Correction
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada. The uprising did not occur in 2006. It took place from 2000 to 2005. The article has been corrected.
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