By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Israeli forces stormed a Palestinian hospital in the occupied West Bank early Tuesday morning, killing three militants, including a commander in Hamas, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian officials.
The top Palestinian health official in Jenin, Wisam Sbeihat, said that Israeli forces had entered Ibn Sina Specialized Hospital in the northern West Bank city of Jenin dressed in civilian clothes and carrying weapons. They then went to the room where the Hamas commander, Mohammad Jalamneh, 27, was staying with two friends, and shot all three dead, Mr. Sbeihat said.
Surveillance video released by the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry on Tuesday shows several gunmen in apparent civilian garb — including one dressed in a white medical coat and another in blue scrubs — walking through the hospital halls, brandishing weapons.
“They assassinated these three people, including a patient,” Dr. Sbeihat said in a phone interview, adding that the Israeli forces also arrested two Palestinian medical workers.
In a statement, Hamas mourned Mr. Jalamneh as a leader in the Al-Qassam Brigades, the Palestinian faction’s armed wing. A local militia affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed his companions — Mohammad and Basil Ghazawi — as members.
The Israeli military said all three had been involved in militant activity, including attacks against Israelis. Mr. Jalamneh had also been planning “to carry out a terror attack in the immediate future and used the hospital as a hiding place,” the military said.
One of the men accompanying him, Basil Ghazawi, was being treated in the hospital’s rehabilitation ward, Mr. Sbeihat said. The Israeli military said that he and his brother, Mohammed Ghazawi, had “hid inside the hospital.”
Surging violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where millions of Palestinians live under Israeli military rule, has prompted fears of another front in the Middle East crisis spiraling out of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Since the war in Gaza began, at least 367 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and civilians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the highest toll in years, the United Nations said on Monday.
Israel has escalated its attempts to crack down on Palestinian militant activity in the West Bank since Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attack on Israel prompted full-blown war. More than 2,960 Palestinians have been arrested since the beginning of the war in near-daily raids, according to the Israeli military.
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