JENIN/GAZA: Palestinian officials said Zionist forces killed 12 people in three separate raids in the northern West Bank on Tuesday, as violence in the occupied territory showed no sign of abating. Five people were killed in the Jenin area and four in Aqaba town in Tubas district when Zionist forces carried out early-morning raids, the health ministry in Ramallah said.

The Zionist army said three people were killed and two arrested in another raid in the village of Kafr Qud, west of Jenin. The Palestinian Red Crescent had earlier reported deaths and injuries “due to the occupation’s shelling of two vehicles in the eastern neighborhood of Jenin”. The strikes came during a Zionist military operation in Jenin in which footage shared on social media showed a column of armored personnel carriers entering the city and armored bulldozers digging up roads.

Aqaba residents said Zionist troops arrived at dawn and surrounded the house of Amid Ghanam, leading to clashes between troops and young Palestinians. Ghanam and two others were killed in the clashes, while another teenager was killed near a hospital, Tubas governor Ahmed Assad told AFP.

“The army entered and surrounded the house as snipers took positions on nearby rooftops and shot anyone who moved,” he said. The teenager was shot when the troops “entered the area of the hospital”, Assad said.

Aqaba mayor Abdel Razzaq Abu Arra said the teenager “was killed in cold blood”. “This Zionist crime is a systematic crime that the (Zionists) carry out on a daily basis,” he added. In a separate incident on Tuesday, police said they killed a Palestinian after he attacked a border police officer with a screwdriver at a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

The Zionist military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,653 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, mostly women and children. On Tuesday, air strikes killed five Palestinians in the Al-Bureij camp, in the central Gaza Strip, medics said, while two others were killed in a separate air strike in Rafah, near the southern Gaza border with Egypt. The Islamist movement’s armed wing said its fighters destroyed two Zionist troop carriers in an ambush east of Rafah, where heavy fighting has been reported for weeks.

The territory’s health ministry said Zionist military strikes have killed at least 30 Palestinians and wounded 66 others in the past 24 hours. “Many victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, where the teams of the ambulance and civil emergency service can’t reach,” the ministry said in a statement.

Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced multiple times since the start of the war and the fighting has brought misery to thousands trapped in overcrowded tent shelters. Residents said Zionist tank shelling continued overnight in Bureij, Al-Maghazi, Nuseirat and Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands of displaced families from all over the enclave have sought temporary refuge. Residents and Hamas media said tanks made a brief advance earlier on Tuesday in Al-Zahra City northwest of Nuseirat. – Agencies