Israeli military pulls out of West Bank after 10-day raid

Israeli military forces seemed to pull out of the Palestinian city of Jenin on Friday, ending a 10-day raid that resulted in 21 deaths, including children, and extensive damage to infrastructure, homes, and businesses, according to Palestinian news sources and local residents.

ِHours after the Israeli military pulled back from the city, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian civil defense teams, along with public works and utility employees, fanned out to assess the damage and began the effort to restore essential services, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether all soldiers had left Jenin or whether they would soon return. As Israeli forces have conducted one of their most extensive and deadly raids in the West Bank in years, they have pulled back from Palestinian cities and towns several times over the past week before coming back.

In a statement Friday, the Israeli military did not comment on a withdrawal but said its forces “are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation.”

Palestinian residents who had been trapped in their homes for days -- as Israeli troops and bulldozers roamed Jenin -- ventured into the streets Friday, and some who had fled the raid returned. They found their neighborhoods unrecognizable.

“God, I just collapsed,” said Kareeman Abu Naise, 30, when she saw video of her home taken by her father-in-law, who had returned to the neighborhood known as Jenin camp.

Abu Naise, who had fled the raid, heard from neighbors Sunday that Israeli soldiers had fired a missile at their home, which had already been damaged by an Israeli bulldozer. That night, she said, she couldn’t sleep and cried for hours.

Seeing the damage on video -- including the destroyed ground-floor living room where they had received guests -- was even more difficult.

“Literally, everything we had was in that house. Our belongings, all our memories, the good and the bad,” said Abu Naise, a mother of two. Her husband, Muhammad, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in 2022 as he walked home from work.

“Two of the most precious things to me were my husband and my house,” she said, “and now I’ve lost them both.”

The raids of the past 10 days, which included assaults on the city of Tulkarem, were among the deadliest in the territory in years. At least 39 people have been killed across the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which said that the past week was the deadliest for Palestinian civilians in the West Bank since November.

Nearly 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. The Israeli military has described the raids that began Aug. 28 -- a marked escalation over the near-nightly operations that had already become the norm there -- as an effort to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and combat rising attacks against Israelis.

News.Az