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By Maytaal Angel and Ali Sawafta
JERUSALEM/JENIN, West Bank (Reuters) -Israeli troops killed a local commander of the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad movement in the West Bank and four other militants on Thursday in a gunbattle during one of the largest assaults in the Israeli-occupied territory for months.
The military said it killed Muhhamad Jabber, known as Abu Shujaa, the head of a network of fighters in the adjacent Nur Shams refugee camp, during a "significant exchange of fire" around a mosque in the city of Tulkarm in which four other Palestinian fighters were also killed.
The Tulkarm division of Islamic Jihad's armed wing confirmed his death, which brought the total number of Palestinians killed during the past two days to 17, and said fighters had attacked Israeli forces near the Abu Ubaida mosque.
The operation began in the early hours of Wednesday with hundreds of Israeli troops backed by helicopters, drones and armoured personnel carriers raiding the flashpoint cities of Tulkarm, Jenin and areas in the Jordan Valley.
There was also a complete network outage at Jawwal, one of the two main telecommunications companies in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, according to the Reuters witness.
In Jenin earlier, Israeli bulldozers edged along empty, rubbish-strewn streets as the sound of drones pierced the sky.
The troops searched ambulances on the streets and in front of Jenin's main hospital, having blocked off access to it on Wednesday to prevent fighters from seeking refuge there.
United Nations Secretary general Antonio Guterres said Israel's launch of large scale military operations was "deeply concerning" and called for an immediate halt.
In response, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon said the operations had a clear goal: "preventing Iranian terror-by-proxy that would harm Israeli civilians."
Clashes with Israeli forces in the West Bank have escalated since Israel's war with Hamas militants began in Gaza nearly 11 months ago.
More than 660 people - combatants and civilians - have been killed, according to Palestinian tallies, some by Jewish settlers who have carried out frequent vigilante-style attacks on West Bank Palestinian communities.
ESCALATING CLASHES
Israel says Iran provides weapons and support to militant factions in the West Bank and the military has, as a result, cranked up its operations there.
Referring to the latest operation, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X overnight: "This is a war in every sense, and we must win it."
He accused Iran of working to destabilise Jordan and establish an eastern front against Israel, as it had done in Gaza and in Lebanon, where Israel has been trading almost daily fire with militants from the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah.
Katz said that to address the threat of an eastern front, Israel would have to use "all necessary means, including, in cases of intense combat, allowing the population to temporarily evacuate from one neighbourhood to another to prevent civilian harm".
In the Gaza Strip, evacuation orders have displaced nearly all of the coastal enclave's 2.3 million people several times, giving rise to deadly hunger and disease.
Amnesty International said it is likely the intensified scale of Israel's West Bank operation would result in an increase in forced displacement, destruction of critical infrastructure and measures of "collective punishment", which have been key pillars of what it called Israel’s "system of apartheid".
Israel denies having any practice of collective punishment or apartheid in the West Bank, saying it seeks only to defeat armed Palestinian militants threatening its security.
The latest round of Israeli-Palestinian violence began on Oct. 7 after Hamas militants stormed from Gaza into southern Israel, killing 1,200 and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Israel's Gaza campaign has since demolished swathes of the enclave, and killed more than 40,500 people, Palestinian health officials say.
(Reporting by Maytaal Angel and Ali Sawafta; Additional reporting by Jana Choukeir and Nidal Al Mughrabi; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Sharon Singleton, William Maclean)
