PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES  -  Israel on Monday began a large-scale military raid with drone strikes and hundreds of troops in the northern occupied West Bank, killing nine Palestinians in what the army labelled an "extensive coun­terterrorism effort."

The operation under the hard-right government of Prime Minister Ben­jamin Netanyahu is the biggest of its kind in years, with bulldozers, ar­moured vehicles and unmanned ae­rial vehicles. Palestinian gunmen wearing balaclavas fired towards Is­raeli soldiers as sirens wailed. Other Palestinians threw stones.

Israel had already stepped up op­erations in the northern West Bank, home to Jenin city and its adjacent refugee camp, which is a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups and where there has been a spate of at­tacks on Israelis as well as attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian com­munities. "We are striking the ter­rorism hub (of Jenin) with great strength," Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told reporters.

The Palestinian health ministry said seven people were killed -- match­ing the toll from an Israeli army raid in Jenin refugee camp two weeks ago which saw rare use of helicopter mis­sile fire. "There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground," Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Pal­estinian Red Crescent in Jenin, told AFP. "Several houses and sites have been bombed... smoke is rising from every­where." The Israeli army said its forc­es had struck a "joint operations cen­ter", which served as a command post for the "Jenin Brigade", a local militant group. The area is nominally under the control of president Mah­mud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which has par­tial administrative control in the West Bank. The army said it targeted an “obser­vation and reconnaissance” site, as well as a weapons storage facility and a hide­out for those alleged to have carried out attacks on Israe­li targets in recent months. Violence in the Israeli-Pal­estinian conflict has wors­ened since early last year, including under the lat­est administration of Net­anyahu which took power in December, a coalition be­tween his Likud party and extreme-right and ultra-Or­thodox Jewish allies. Net­anyahu’s coalition contains hardline West Bank settlers, including extreme-right Na­tional Security Minister Ita­mar Ben-Gvir. “People were aware that we were proba­bly going in”, army spokes­man Richard Hecht told reporters, “but the meth­od of striking from the air”, with a target in the core of the camp, “basically caught them by surprise,” He said troops remained inside the camp but were after “spe­cific targets” and “not try­ing to hold ground.”