AT least 18 people have been killed in an Israeli air attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
The Israeli military said that its fighter jets had carried out the attack on Thursday in coordination with Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet.
The army said in a later statement that it had targeted the head of Hamas’s infrastructure in Tulkarem.
The Palestinian group did not immediately comment on the Israeli military’s claim.
A camp official, Faisal Salama, told the AFP news agency that the strike had been carried out with an F-16 fighter.
Footage verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency showed scenes of devastation in the camp, located northwest of Nablus in the north of the West Bank.
The area was filled with massive piles of wreckage and fires had broken out. Rescuers could be seen rushing injured victims to receive medical care.
Israeli military raids and attacks have surged across the occupied West Bank since Israel launched its war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
Between October 7 of last year and the end of September, 695 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, according to a tally from the United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA).
The vast majority of people were killed by the Israeli army, while a dozen were killed by Israeli settlers, OCHA said.
Reporting from Amman, Jordan, in the early hours of Friday, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the attack on the Tulkarem refugee camp was “the largest and deadliest air strike that we’ve seen in the occupied West Bank for over 20 years”.
“Even by the second Intifada standards, this was a very large, very deadly strike on a densely populated, impoverished refugee camp,” Odeh reported.
The Tulkarem refugee camp is home to more than 21,000 people, living in an area of only 0.18 square kilometres (0.11 square miles), according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (PDF).
Odeh added that information on the attack was still coming in “because hospitals have been overwhelmed”.
