Israel stepped up military operations in the West Bank for a seventh day on Tuesday, in the second front of its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

A report by Al Jazeera noted, “Arrests, violence and destruction have been reported as the Israeli military continued to mount raids across the occupied West Bank.” 

Press TV, an Iranian publication, reported that the Israeli military shot a 16-year-old Palestinian girl in the city of Jenin in the north of the West Bank, where the Zionist assault has been concentrated since last Wednesday. The report said Israeli forces “denied medical access to her for over half an hour, leaving her to bleed to death, says the Palestinian Red Crescent.”

Video posted on X showed military vehicles running over the body of an 82-year-old man on Sunday. He was shot in Jenin by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Friday and also left to bleed to death as medical personnel were blocked from coming to his aid.

Photos from Jenin show that Israeli military vehicles have bulldozed its main streets into rubble and made them impassable. Meanwhile, the IDF has imposed a curfew on the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp and prevented residents from leaving or entering, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Press TV also reported that Israeli troops “handed the body of a 58-year-old Palestinian to health authorities in Kafr Dan hours after they abducted him. The victim was identified as Ayman Rajeh Abed.”

The report said, “His body came in handcuffed and bearing signs of torture, according to Wissam Bakr, the director of Jenin Governmental Hospital.”

Speaking to the Turkish news agency Anadolu on Sunday, the mayor of Jenin, Nidal al-Obaidi, compared the ongoing Israeli military operation in Jenin to an “earthquake,” estimating that about 500 million shekels ($135.2 million) of damage had been caused so far.

The mayor also said, “The destruction caused by Israeli forces is immense, including the damage to infrastructure, such as the destruction of water and communication lines and the targeting of electricity transformers.”

Meanwhile, military operations in the Tulkarem refugee camp in the south were mounted for a second time in the past week. Wafa reported that a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Kanaan, was killed by an Israeli sniper. Al Jazeera reporter Nida Ibrahim said the teen, “was shot in the neck as he was going to a mosque with his father for prayers.” His father was also shot, in the abdomen, the report said.

Other reports of military action by Israel in the West Bank, including the storming of Birzeit University, north of Ramallah, and the confiscation of “properties and publications.” Al Jazeera also said, “A young man was injured in a raid in Qalqilya, a city in the northwest of the territory, after Israeli forces opened fire.”

Palestinian health officials have reported that 30 people have been killed in the West Bank since the Israeli offensive began. The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society reported that 22 people were arrested in the West Bank over a 24-hour period ending on Tuesday, bringing the total number of arrests over the past week to 70. More than 10,000 Palestinians have been detained in the West Bank since last October.

At least 682 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and fascist settler attacks in the West Bank since October 7 of last year. Exposing the objective of ethnic cleansing behind the assault on the West Bank, more than 3,000 Palestinians have been displaced due to Israeli army demolitions of their homes, while the United Nations has recorded 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians since the Gaza genocide began.

At 2,183 square miles, the West Bank is the larger of the two Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel. It is approximately 15 times the size of the Gaza strip and home to 2.9 million Palestinians. The West Bank is bordered to the east by the Jordan River and the Dead Sea and to the south, west and north by Israel.

The Jenin refugee camp is a center of Palestinian militancy and resistance to Israeli occupation. It was established in 1953 to provide shelter for Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes by Zionists thugs during the Nakba in 1948.

The Jenin camp has a population density of 33,000 per square mile, which is more than twice that of Gaza. Unemployment in the Jenin camp is one in five, and conditions are dire with lack of sewage systems and shortages of water and electricity.

The West Bank was annexed in 1948 and ruled by Jordan until the Six-Day War in 1967 when Israel occupied it. Since then, the United Nations and International Court of Justice (ICJ) have repeatedly characterized both the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories” and demanded Palestinian rights to sovereignty over the areas. In July 2024, the ICJ stated that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”

During his presentation on Monday, amid mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv denouncing the government for refusing to secure a hostage-exchange deal with Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of Israel that entirely omitted the West Bank.

Standing in front of a wall-sized digital map which obliterated its existence, Netanyahu did not mention the offensive in the West Bank while he defended the Israeli government’s opposition to a cease fire and continuation of the Gaza genocide.

The presentation is without a doubt designed to appease the demands of fascist political forces within Israel such as Israeli minister of settlement, Orit Strock, who called on the government on Monday to go further and declare a state of war in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the US-backed barbaric assault on Gaza is being continued with 33 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military over the past 24 hours.

Al Jazeera reported that several have been injured, including children, in an Israeli air attack on a home in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City. “Earlier, we reported that nine people had been killed in an Israeli attack on a home in Gaza City, which is in the north of the Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera said.

Majid Abu Ramadan, Palestine Authority Minister of Health, renewed his appeal to the international community to keep pressure on Israel to halt bombings and allow authorities to carry out a large-scale vaccination campaign against polio in Gaza, according to the Wafa news agency.

Ramadan said a total of 1.6 million doses have arrived and this is the amount needed to vaccinate all children aged between one day and 10 years with two doses each. The Israeli blockade and attacks on Gaza have enabled polio to return to the strip after an absence of 25 years, prompting the United Nations and local health authorities to launch a vaccination campaign.

On Tuesday, the US Justice Department announced criminal charges Tuesday against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas officials in connection with the October 7, 2023, uprising in Israel. The seven count criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York City—charging conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, conspiracy to murder US nationals and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, resulting in death—is an exercise by the US judiciary in the height of cynicism.

The US government has over the past 30 years—whether led by a Democrat or Republican in the White House—engaged in an unending campaign of criminal imperialist wars of aggression that have resulted in the deaths of over 2 million people in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine.