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Israeli commandos disguised as Arab doctors and patients killed three Palestinian men after entering a hospital in the occupied West Bank, with the Israeli military claiming they were planning future attacks.
CCTV footage from the Ibn Sina Hospital in the city of Jenin showed people in medical uniform and others moving through the hospital carrying weapons and restraining civilians.
A hospital employee, who asked not to be named, said the Israelis used silenced firearms and shot two men in their hospital beds. Images circulating on social media, which the employee confirmed, showed two adjoining bloodstained beds.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed that Mohammed Jalamneh, 27, had been in touch with Hamas militants abroad, and had transferred weapons to set up attacks. The two others killed were brothers Basel and Mohammed Ghazawi, whom the military said were members of the Jenin Battalion and the Islamic Jihad militant groups. The IDF said a handgun was found in the hospital. The IDF claims cannot be verified.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in statements on Telegram, claimed the killed men as members of their groups.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health condemned the killings, saying “the occupation is committing a new massacre inside hospitals”. Israel has accused Palestinian fighters of using hospitals as cover, especially in Gaza.
Médecins Sans Frontières, which supports several West Bank hospitals, said last month that Israeli troops had “besieged multiple hospitals in Jenin, creating a direct impediment to healthcare”.
“The obstruction of healthcare has unfortunately become common practice,” the aid group said. “During each incursion, various hospitals, including the public one, were surrounded by Israeli forces.”
Jenin’s refugee camps are a hotbed of Palestinian militancy, and have been the target of frequent Israeli raids since October 7, when Hamas launched a cross-border raid from the Gaza Strip, killing 1,200 people.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed more than 25,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, displaced the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.3mn inhabitants and reduced huge swaths of the territory to rubble.
Israeli troops have encountered improvised explosive devices, and fierce resistance from militant groups within Jenin, where the narrow lanes leading to refugee camps have been cut off from the rest of the city by Israeli army bulldozers. Last month the army called in an air strike from a drone, the first in recent memory, to rescue several police officers pinned down during one such raid.