Israel’s Katz says military to remain in West Bank refugee camps

Tel Aviv – Israeli troops will remain in parts of the West Bank that are heavily populated by Palestinian refugees at least until the end of the year, Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Sunday.

Katz wrote on X that the quarters in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams were “hotbeds of terror” that had served as a front against Israel with Iranian support.

Following a large-scale military operation, he said, “there is no more terror in the camps today.”

At the beginning of the year, the Israeli military launched its largest offensive in years against militant Palestinians in the northern West Bank.

Many people were killed and tens of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, with massive destruction inflicted on the neighbourhoods.

The United Nations and the European Union criticized the operation, in which the UN said women and children were also killed.

In February, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights highlighted “an unprecedented scale of mass displacement not seen in decades in the occupied West Bank.”

Before the offensive, there had been repeated attacks on Israelis in the West Bank. Since the start of the Gaza war almost two years ago, violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians has also increased.

Israel took the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with other territories, in the Six-Day War in 1967.

Today, around 700,000 Israeli settlers live there among 3 million Palestinians. The Palestinians claim the territories as their own state with East Jerusalem as its capital.