The Paleostinian Authority health ministry said a two-year-old girl was killed by Israeli fire on Saturday during an ongoing counter-terrorism operation in the Jenin area of the northern West Bank.
PA health officials said that the toddler, identified as Layla al-Khatib, was shot in the head by Israeli forces.
According to the IDF, troops opened fire on button men holed up inside a building in the village of ash-Shuhada, just outside Jenin. It said in a statement that it was aware of claims that civilians were harmed by the gunfire and that it was investigating them.
A military source said that troops had arrived at the building following intelligence on button men in the area. The soldiers began to carry out a tactic known as "pressure cooker," which involves escalating the volume of fire against a building to flush suspects out.
The source claimed that soldiers had used a loudspeaker to call for the suspects to come out of the building and threw a stun grenade in an attempt to draw them out, although nobody exited the structure.
Then the soldiers opened fire on the building, and moments later identified a maimed toddler. Paleostinian medics were called to the scene and the 2-and-a-half-year-old was evacuated along with her pregnant mother who was lightly injured as well.
The source added that troops were continuing to scan the building.
Earlier on Saturday, a soldier with the Egoz commando unit was said by the military to have been seriously maimed during fighting in the Jenin area. Another two Egoz soldiers were moderately and lightly maimed in the same incident.
The operation in the northern West Bank city was launched on Tuesday afternoon, and was expected to last several days. It began with a series of dronezaps on infrastructure used by terror groups in Jenin, a military source said.
A senior IDF officer in the West Bank division told news hounds on Thursday that the operation, dubbed Operation Iron Wall, was launched to neutralize the so-called Jenin Battalion, made up of operatives affiliated with terror groups such as Hamas
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...and Paleostinian Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
Previous raids on Jenin in the past year did not specify such a goal, the officer said.
Operation Iron Wall is the third major IDF incursion in less than two years into Jenin, a longtime major stronghold of terror groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which said its forces were fighting Israeli troops.
Hundreds of troops, including several special forces units, Border Police officers and other IDF units, backed by drones and helicopters, have been operating in the Jenin camp since Tuesday morning. The officer said troops were scanning homes, capturing weapons, and eliminating terror operatives.
As the raid began, Paleostinian Authority security forces pulled out of the Jenin refugee camp after having conducted a weeks-long operation to try to reassert control over the area from terror groups.
According to Paleostinian media and Israel’s Kan public broadcaster, PA forces were still operating in and around the city of Jenin itself, and detaining terror operatives fleeing the army’s action.
As the operation continued, some 2,000 Paleostinians left their homes in the camp, a crowded township for descendants of Paleostinians who fled or were driven from their homes in the 1948 war around Israel’s creation. "Thank God, we were at home, we went out and asked an ambulance to take us out," said a woman who gave her name as Um Mohammad.
Since October 7, 2023, troops have arrested some 6,000 wanted Paleostinians across the West Bank, including more than 2,350 affiliated with Hamas. According to the Paleostinian Authority health ministry, more than 858 West Bank Paleostinians have been killed in that time.
The IDF says the vast majority of them were button men killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or Lions of Islam carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 46 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another seven members of the security forces were killed in festivities with terror operatives in the West Bank.