Bombed, then stabbed: West Bank doctors recall horrors of refugee camp raid

The Israeli raids on the Nur Shams and Fawwar refugee camps followed a pattern of deadly assaults in the West Bank.

Fawwar, occupied West Bank — It was one o’clock at night when the casualties started arriving at Thabet Thabet Governmental Hospital in the city of Tulkarem.

There were six of them, all with critical wounds, said Dr Iyad al-Aqqad, the hospital’s medical director. They were victims of an Israeli bombing on the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, during a raid that started on the night of December 26 and continued into the early hours of the following day.

It was the second time in 24 hours that Israeli forces had stormed the camp, entering several homes, and dropping at least two bombs, including on an industrial facility. Israeli soldiers are often accused — both in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip — of not allowing ambulances to reach the wounded promptly. That is what happened in Nur Shams too, say witnesses and doctors — a two-hour delay during which the six men were bleeding.

By the time they were brought to al-Aqqad’s hospital, it was too late to save them.

The six joined a ballooning list of Palestinians killed in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and illegal settlers since October 7, when a Hamas attack on southern Israel sparked a deadly war of retribution focused on — though not limited to — Gaza. Since then, Israeli bombing and artillery attacks have killed more than 21,000 people in Gaza, while Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 300 people in the West Bank. At least 56 people have been killed in Tulkarem governorate itself, according to the Shireen Observatory, a non-profit group that tracks killings and arrests by Israeli forces.