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The Israeli military said it would press ahead with its biggest raid in the occupied West Bank for two decades, which has killed 10 Palestinians and forced hundreds of families to flee the violence.
Hundreds of Israeli troops, backed by armed drones, entered the Jenin refugee camp in the early hours of Monday, setting off an intense round of fighting that destroyed buildings and roads in the densely populated area.
An Israeli military spokesman told Israeli media that the incursion continued on Tuesday, and that the army still had 10 sites in Jenin that it intended to search. But he also said there had not been major fighting overnight between soldiers and militants.
Palestinian health officials said on Tuesday that in addition to the 10 fatalities, more than 100 people had been injured, 20 seriously. One Israeli soldier was also injured.
The Red Crescent earlier said that some 500 families were evacuated from the camp, which is home to roughly 14,000 people, but that by midnight Israeli forces had closed its entrances.
The raid, which the Israeli military said was part of an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”, follows a year of spiralling violence in the West Bank which has sparked concerns that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be on the verge of a renewed eruption.
This year is already on course to be the deadliest in the West Bank — which Palestinians seek as the heart of a future state, but which Israel has occupied since 1967 — since the UN began collecting data in 2005.
According to the latest UN figures, which do not include the most recent fighting, Israeli forces have killed 114 Palestinians in the territory this year, while Palestinians have killed 16 Israelis.
The violence has reached new levels over the past two weeks, with Israel deploying helicopter gunships and armed drones over the West Bank for the first time since the early 2000s, when 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis died during a Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada.
The impoverished Jenin camp, a stronghold for militants from several Palestinian factions, has become the centre of the violence, with Israeli forces raiding it repeatedly over the past 18 months.
The Israeli military on Tuesday said it had destroyed two “situation rooms”, an explosives store, and a grenade launcher belonging to militant groups, and confiscated weapons and other military equipment.
Médecins Sans Frontières, another aid group, said Israeli military bulldozers had destroyed multiple roads into the camp, “making it nearly impossible for ambulances to reach patients”.
“Palestinian paramedics have been forced to proceed on foot, in an area with active gunfire and drone strikes,” the group said.
The Red Crescent said its team in the camp was denied access to certain locations and was having “great difficulty” moving around because of the destruction.
Leaders from Arab and Muslim countries condemned the raid, with the Algerian foreign ministry saying it “violate[d] all international norms and laws and the most basic human values”. Turkey’s foreign ministry warned it could trigger “a new spiral of violence”.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads the most rightwing government in the country’s history, defended the operation, insisting that Israel was “determining a new equation against terrorism”.
“Our guiding principle is simple: whoever murders Israelis, whoever conspires to murder us, will be in either jail or the grave,” he said at an event on Monday evening.