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KUWAIT CITY, July 4, (Agencies): The State of Kuwait strongly condemns the Israeli occupation forces’ aggression on a refugee camp in the West Bank’s city of Jenin, which resulted in martyrdom and injury of many Palestinians, the foreign ministry said Tuesday. Kuwait categorically rejected this “blatant escalation and ongoing assaults carried out by the occupation forces against the Palestinian people, which represent a new series of their systematic violations of international humanitarian law and international agreements,” the ministry added in a statement.
Kuwait, it said, called anew on the international community and UN Security Council to intervene, and live up to their political, legal and humanitarian responsibilities to stop this aggression, and to provide international protection for the Palestinian people in line with the international law. The Arab League extraordinary session at the level of permanent delegates kicked off Tuesday, at the request of Palestine, to discuss the Arab movement to confront the continuous Israeli aggression on the city of Jenin. Egypt’s permanent representative to the Arab League, Chairman of the current session, Mohammad Orfy, affirmed in his speech that the brutal killing taking place in Jenin, using the Israeli war machine, would reduce to a large extent the chances of reviving the peace process. He also added that the practices of the Israeli occupation in Jenin are a clear and explicit “violation of international law” and international legitimacy and hinder the efforts exerted to achieve the necessary calm and settlement for the same purpose that the peoples of the region and the world aspire to.
Orfy said that what is happening in Jenin is somehow linked to the continuous violations of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which are being subjected to at an accelerating pace, under public directives, and not only in disguise, by extremists. For his part, Jordan’s delegate to the League of Arab States, Amjad Al-Adayleh, affirmed the “total rejection” of all the repeated Israeli aggression and condemnable crimes committed against the Palestinian people without the slightest regard for humanitarian standards and international legal charters and constants. He also stressed the need to stop the Israeli attacks on the occupied Palestinian territories, stop the continuous incursions into Palestinian cities, protect them from repeated attacks, and provide protection for the Palestinian people.
In latest development, a Hamas militant drove his car into a crowded bus stop in Tel Aviv on Tuesday and began stabbing people, wounding eight in an attack praised by Palestinian militant groups as a response to Israel’s ongoing military operation in the occupied West Bank. Police chief Kobi Shabtai told reporters that an armed civilian shot and killed the assailant. The attack came as Israeli troops pressed ahead with their hunt for Palestinian militants and weapons in a West Bank refugee camp Tuesday, after military bulldozers tore through alleys and thousands of residents fl ed to safety.
The two-day Palestinian death toll rose to 10. The large-scale raid of the Jenin camp, which began Monday, is one of the most intense military operations in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades. It bore hallmarks of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces growing pressure from his ultranationalist political allies for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four people.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Tuesday that the two-day death toll rose to 10, with two more deaths reported overnight. The Israeli military has claimed all were militants, but did not provide details. During Tuesday’s operations, the military said it had seized weapons and demolished tunnels beneath a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp. A spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Monday that Israel had launched the operation because some 50 attacks over the past year had emanated from Jenin. The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022. It was also a hotbed of Palestinian military activity in the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.
On Tuesday, hundreds of Israeli troops continued to operate in the camp, seizing weapons and explosives and destroying tunnels and command posts, the army said. Israeli media reported that the army had arrested at least 120 suspected Palestinian militants since Monday. The Palestinian self-rule government in the West Bank and three Arab countries with normalized ties with Israel – Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – condemned Israel’s incursion, as did the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation. More than 140 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades. Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis have killed at least 26 people.
Israel says the raids are meant to crack down on Palestinians militants and thwart attacks. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers. Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also died. Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.