Israel’s military has launched air raids on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank, carrying out an ongoing attack that involved a missile and the killing of at least four Palestinians, according to residents and officials.

Residents said Israel launched at least 10 air attacks in Jenin early on Monday, sending smoke billowing from the wreckage of buildings. A convoy with dozens of Israeli armoured vehicles also surrounded the refugee camp from all sides and launched a ground military operation, causing heavy damage to homes and roads.

Another Palestinian, 21-year-old Mohammad Hasanein, was killed overnight on Monday by the Israeli army at the northern entrance to the city of Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank, the health ministry said.

The ministry has yet to identify the four people killed in Jenin. At least 27 other Palestinians were injured in the camp, including eight in severe condition.

The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry said on Monday morning it “condemns in the strongest terms the barbaric aggression of the occupation against our people in Jenin and its camp,” and held the Israeli government responsible.

It noted that the Israeli aggression targeted “defenseless civilians, including targeting ambulances, crews, and health centers, depriving them of treating the wounded, targeting mosques and homes, and destroying infrastructure.”

The ministry said it “calls for urgent international and American intervention to stop the aggression immediately and calls on the International Criminal Court to break its silence and start holding the Israeli war criminals accountable.”

‘Real war’

“What is going on in the [Jenin] refugee camp is real war,” Khaled Alahmad, a Palestinian ambulance driver, told the Reuters news agency on Monday. “There were strikes from the sky targeting the camp, every time we drive in around five to seven ambulances, and we come back full of injured people,” he added.

“There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground,” Mahmoud al-Saadi, the director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, told the AFP news agency.

“Several houses and sites have been bombed…. smoke is rising from everywhere,” said al-Saadi.

The Israeli attacks set off a gun battle with Palestinian resistance fighters that lasted into Monday morning, with the sounds of explosives and drones continuing to be heard across Jenin on Monday morning.

As daylight broke on Monday, thick black smoke from burning tyres set alight by residents swirled through the streets and calls to support the fighters rang out from loudspeakers in mosques.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah, said the Israeli military also announced the arrest of several “wanted Palestinians and the seizure of explosive devices”.

“Those are the homemade Palestinian explosives that wounded eight Israeli soldiers during last month’s Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp. This was something that caught the Israeli forces by surprise and led to the use of choppers to drop missiles on Palestinians. This is the first incident of its kind that we’ve seen in the refugee camp and in the occupied West Bank in roughly 20 years,” Ibrahim said.

“Things are quite tense in the refugee camp. Ambulances cannot get to the wounded, and we are expecting the number of casualties to increase,” she said.

The Israeli military said in a statement on Monday that it struck a “joint operations centre”, which served as a command centre for the Jenin Brigades, a unit comprised of fighters from different Palestinian armed groups.

It said the site functioned as an “advanced observation and reconnaissance centre” and a weapons and explosives site as well as a coordination and communications hub for Palestinian fighters.

It also provided an aerial photograph showing what it said was the target site and which indicated that the building hit was located near two schools and a medical centre.

Escalating violence

The Jenin Brigades said it was engaging the Israeli forces, while the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad armed group said in a statement that “all options are open to strike the enemy [Israel] in response to its aggression in Jenin”.

The attacks on Monday came amid escalating violence in the West Bank, including the first Israeli drone assault in the area since 2006, increasing military raids on Jenin and northern occupied Palestinian territories and settler attacks in Palestinian villages.

At least three Palestinians were killed in the Israeli drone attack on June 21, while seven were killed and more than 100 wounded in a raid that involved helicopter gunships over Jenin on June 19. Palestinian gunmen also killed four Israeli settlers on June 20, while at least one Palestinian man was shot dead the next day as Israeli settlers stormed the village of Turmus Ayya and set fire to dozens of cars and homes.

The recent unrest has prompted global concern, with the United Nations human rights chief condemning Israel’s use of heavy weaponry, including drones and helicopter gunships, in the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.

Volker Turk called the Israeli attacks a “major intensification of the use of weaponry more generally associated with the conduct of armed hostilities, rather than a law enforcement situation”.

“Israel must urgently reset its policies and actions in the West Bank in line with international human rights standards, including protecting and respecting the right to life,” he added.

‘Revenge for resistance’

The escalating violence has left dozens of people dead since the start of the year.

At least 185 Palestinians, 25 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian have been killed, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources from both sides.

Ali Abunimah, the founder of The Electronic Intifada website, blamed Israel for the ongoing violence, saying it was “Israel that is constantly escalating as the occupying power”.

“Remember that Jenin and the northern West Bank, in general, are intensely subject to Israeli settler colonisation by the most fanatical settlers, who have been engaging in pogroms across the West Bank in recent weeks, aided and abetted and supported by the Israeli army and the Israeli government,” Abunimah told Al Jazeera.

“This attack on Jenin is entirely about satisfying the bloodlust of Israeli settlers and getting revenge on the Palestinian people for the increasing resistance to the settler invasion of the northern West Bank and the increasing record levels of theft of Palestinian land for colonial settlement,” he said.

“It is the resistance that is responding to Israeli colonisation and invasion, not Israel responding to Palestinians.”

Abunimah said Israel and its enablers in the West, principally the United States and the European Union, were “solely responsible for the bloodshed”.