Saturday's killings in the Tulkarem refugee camp laid bare the pressures tearing at Palestinian society as the Israel-Hamas war worsens what has already been a bloody year for the territory. Deadly Israeli military raids, settler attacks and Palestinian militancy in the West Bank have surged since Israel mounted its devastating offensive in Gaza in response to Hamas' Oct. 7 bloody rampage through southern Israel.
Over 230 Palestinian have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank in the past seven weeks alone, most of them during Israeli army raids targeting militants. On Saturday, Israeli forces raided the northern Palestinian town of Qabatiya seeking to arrest militants, sparking a firefight and killing a locally prominent doctor, 25-year-old Shamekh Abu al-Rub, Palestinian health officials said. Abu al-Rub was the son of Kamal Abu al-Rub, governor of the Palestinian city of Jenin.
In the Tulkarem refugee camp, a local militant group accused two Palestinians of helping Israeli security forces target the group in a major army raid that killed three key militants on Nov. 6, a Palestinian security officer said. The two alleged informers were in their late 20s and early 30s, respectively, and one was from the camp, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Meanwhile, an AP report Strib carried, where readers facing a Strtib paywall can likely search and find the item on a non-paywalled outlet. Basically, two Palestinians were mob-killed as suspected Israeli collaborators:
A second Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity for the same reason, confirmed that Palestinian security forces were aware of the incident. The public prosecutor's office said it would have details in the coming days about a police investigation into the killings.
The local militant group — affiliated with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular nationalist Fatah party — posted a cryptic statement just after the two men were reported killed. ''We did not wrong them, but they wronged themselves,'' it said.
The family of one of the accused informers sought to distance itself in a statement Saturday, calling its disgraced relative a ''malicious finger that we have cut off without regret."
Two deaths, which are clearly dwarfed by numbers of dead civilians under the Israeli deadly assault on Gaza. Yet circumstances differ from bombs killing the war's other side. A micro event worth reporting as part of something clearly larger.