At least nine dead after large-scale Israeli attack on the West Bank

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The Israeli military has launched a major attack in the occupied West Bank, killing at least nine Palestinians and sealing off a large refugee camp in the northern city of Jenin.

Israeli forces, including armored vehicles, bulldozers and infantry, surrounded the Jenin camp, a stronghold of Palestinian uprisings, and cordoned off the area around a nearby town. Residents reported snipers, drones and occasional firefights in one of the biggest incursions into Palestinian towns in the West Bank in months.

Israeli forces also carried out at least two drone strikes, including one on a house in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the Palestinian town of Tulkarem, which borders a major Israeli highway and villages, and another in the Jordan Valley. Israeli drone strikes have become an increasingly frequent occurrence in the West Bank, killing dozens of people since the war between Israel and Hamas began in October, UN data show.

According to the Israeli military, five men were killed in the attack near Tulkarem, including one who was released in a hostage exchange in November. The soldiers were allegedly involved in the manufacture of explosives.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said three other people were killed in a separate drone attack on a car about 10 miles south of Jenin, a restive Palestinian city that has been raided several times by the Israeli military in recent months.

Two residents of the Jenin camp told the Financial Times that the area had been sealed off from the rest of the city again by Israeli armored vehicles and that drones had been heard flying over the city. The Israeli military denied that any of the raided areas had been sealed off.

A Palestinian Health Ministry official said by telephone that at least a dozen other injured people had been taken to local hospitals with gunshot wounds, and others were trapped in Jenin because ambulances were blocked at the camp's entrance.

The ministry also said that Israeli forces were operating near a hospital in Jenin, but the Israeli forces said they had no intention of taking over the medical facility.

The Israeli military said it was in the “first phase” of an operation and acted in self-defense to repel attacks on Israeli civilians.

Nadav Shoshani, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman, sees the raids as a general attempt to prevent Iran from funding and supporting Palestinian militants. He also said he was not aware of any attempts to force Palestinians to evacuate Jenin, a measure Foreign Minister Israel Katz called for on Wednesday.

Israel has carried out repeated raids in the West Bank during its 10-month war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip to curb the Islamist group's increasing militant activities. Hamas' popularity has been on the rise among Palestinians in the West Bank, which is run by secular Fatah, a rival of Hamas.

According to the UN, at least 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October, 11 of them by armed Jewish settlers and the rest by the Israeli military. According to the Israeli military, at least 30 Israelis were killed in the West Bank during the same period.

Hostilities in Gaza erupted after Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and took at least 240 hostage in a cross-border raid in southern Israel, Israeli officials said. Palestinian officials said more than 40,000 people had been killed in the war that has rocked the coastal enclave.