At least eight people were killed by the Israeli army in the West Bank, Palestinian health authorities reported today, quoted by Reuters and BTA.
The Israeli army said it carried out two separate air strikes on the territory of the West Bank, in which armed militants were killed, but did not provide details of the incident.
The Palestinian Red Crescent confirmed that four people were killed and another wounded in critical condition, in strikes on two vehicles in Jenin – a troubled town in the northern West Bank.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least four Palestinians were killed and seven others wounded in clashes near the town of Tubas. The Palestinian news agency WAFA said the clashes erupted after Israeli forces surrounded a house in the village of Aqaba, near Tubas.
The Associated Press reported that four of those killed in the West Bank were teenagers.
The violence comes as world leaders try to prevent Middle East tensions from escalating into a regional war.
The Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah said it had launched a drone attack on northern Israel early on Sunday, and the Israeli military said two Israeli soldiers were wounded in the attack. The violence comes amid fears of a full-scale regional war, after the assassination of Hezbollah's top commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon last week and Hamas' political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran.
In the past 10 months of war in Gaza, Israel and Hamas have exchanged almost daily strikes.
While most of the strikes have been in border areas, four men were killed today in an Israeli strike on a house in the southern Lebanese town of Mayfadun, about 30 kilometers north of the border with Israel, the Lebanese Health Ministry and other sources said. Agence France-Presse, citing a Lebanese security source, said the four killed were fighters from the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.
Leaders in Egypt and Turkey have said they are doing everything they can to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from escalating into a regional conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, told his cabinet this weekend that Israel was already at war on several fronts with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies.
The head of Iran's paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Wednesday threatened Israel over Haniyeh's killing and warned that Israel was "digging its own grave" with its actions against Hamas. The Israeli defense minister said the army was ready to “quickly move to the offensive“.