Rockets Launched From Gaza Amid Israeli Raid in West Bank and Tel Aviv Attack

Hours after Israel’s leader said a large-scale military incursion aimed at rooting out Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank city of Jenin was wrapping up, five rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel early Wednesday, raising fears of an escalation of tit-for-tat violence.

No injuries were immediately reported from the rocket attack, and the Israeli military said the country’s air-defense system had intercepted all five.

Earlier on Tuesday, eight people were wounded by a Palestinian man in a car-ramming and stabbing attack in Tel Aviv, the Israeli authorities said. A pregnant woman was injured and lost her baby, Israeli television reported.

In security camera footage broadcast on Israeli television, a car can be seen slamming into a curb in a residential area in the northern part of the city. The driver then leaves his car and chases and stabs at passers-by, brandishing a heavy object. He was then shot and killed by a civilian, Israeli security officials said. Three people were in serious condition, the police said.

The Palestinian death toll in the Jenin operation that began on Monday and stretched into Tuesday, the biggest that Israel has launched in the area in many years, rose to 12, Palestinian health officials said on Tuesday. Four of the dead were under 18 years old, and at least five were claimed by Palestinian militant groups as fighters. At least 120 people were injured, including 20 seriously, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces also said on Twitter on Tuesday evening that a soldier had been killed “by gunfire” during the military operation.

The military operation in Jenin and the attack in Tel Aviv added to the sense of uncertainty and tension in the region, after the most right-wing government in Israeli history took power six months ago. The coalition government’s leaders promised to expand Jewish settlements in occupied territory and to administer a tougher response to violence, while the Palestinian Authority has increasingly lost control of hotbeds of militancy in the occupied West Bank.

The military activities sent people fleeing, with as many as 3,000 of the camp’s roughly 17,000 residents seeking shelter in schools and other public buildings, or with families elsewhere. Alleyways were deserted in Jenin’s refugee camp, a usually crowded quarter abutting the West Bank city that was the focus of the military incursion.

“We were huddling together in the middle of our house, terrified that a rocket might strike us at any moment,” said Omar Obeid, 60, a resident of the camp who fled the fighting with his children late Monday night.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late Tuesday afternoon, during a visit to an army base near Jenin, that the operation was in its final stages. “At this moment we are completing the mission,” he said.

The U.N. Security Council will meet on Friday to discuss the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories at the request of the United Arab Emirates, according to a U.N. post on Twitter.

Clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants intensified on Tuesday evening after a relatively calmer period of scattered firefights. The Israeli military said its air force had struck Palestinian militants on the city’s outskirts, while Palestinian officials accused Israeli soldiers of firing tear gas into a hospital. The Israelis denied any attacks near hospitals.

Jenin, long a militant stronghold, has been at the center of escalating tensions and violence in the year leading up to the incursion early on Monday morning. Amid the military operation there, the Israeli authorities said that a West Bank Palestinian had attacked Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, identified the attacker as Abd al-Wahab Khalaila, a 20-year-old Palestinian from Samua, a small town in the southern West Bank. Mr. Khalaila had no prior security record, the agency said.

“We’ve assessed that because of our activity in Judea and Samaria, the motivation and potential for attacks would rise,” the Israeli police chief, Yaakov Shabtai, told reporters, using the biblical name for the West Bank. Mr. Netanyahu vowed the attack would not deter Israel “in our struggle against terrorism.”

Hamas, the Palestinian militant faction that controls Gaza, claimed Mr. Khalaila as a member and praised the attack as a response to “the Zionist occupation’s aggression in Jenin.” But Palestinian groups have been known to claim as members or publicly honor all those killed by Israel, and Hamas stopped short of taking direct responsibility for the assault.

Leaders of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad also issued statements later on Tuesday declaring victory as signs emerged that Israeli troops might be pulling out.

Jenin is a bastion for the militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas, as well as being home to newer armed militias that have sprung up and do not answer to the established organizations, and the area has been the source of dozens of shooting attacks on Israelis, according to Israeli military data.

Israel launched the operation shortly after 1 a.m. on Monday with airstrikes from drones, a new tactic being employed by Israel in the West Bank. The strikes were the most intensive use of air power in the occupied territory in about two decades.

About 1,000 troops searched the camp on Tuesday after earlier finding and confiscating caches of weapons, explosive devices and other military equipment, according to the Israeli military, which added that its forces had also destroyed laboratories for manufacturing explosives.

Israeli officials said that the military incursion was not intended to conquer or hold territory in Jenin, adding that it would continue for as long as it took for the mission to be completed.

Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said on Tuesday that 120 wanted men had been arrested and were being interrogated by the security services.

“There is no point in the camp that we have not reached, including its core,” Admiral Hagari wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. He said that each of the military units operating in the camp had been given a number of defined targets to search during the day, adding, “If we encounter friction with terrorists — we will fight them as well.”

Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior official in the Palestinian Authority, had called on the international community, including the United States, “to intervene immediately” to “stop the Israeli aggression and to force Israel to withdraw immediately from Jenin and its camp,” warning of the displacement of large numbers of residents.

The Palestinian Authority announced that it was ceasing all contact with Israel over the Jenin raid.

Israel said that all those who had been killed so far were combatants. The Palestinian authorities have not specified whether those who died were all combatants or included civilians.

Some Palestinian officials said that Israel had threatened and forced camp residents to evacuate their homes.

“Houses have been demolished, broken into, and the people were forced out of their own homes,” the mayor of Jenin, Nidal Obeidi, told the radio station Voice of Palestine on Tuesday.

Israeli officials denied that they had carried out any forced evacuations but confirmed that some residents had received text messages from Israeli numbers advising them to leave their homes temporarily.

Analysts and former generals with the Israeli military said that it would be in Israel’s interest to wrap up the operation as soon as possible to prevent any spillover of tensions into other areas, such as the Hamas-run territory of Gaza, which could result in a broader conflict.

Even as Palestinian militant groups celebrated what they called a victory over Israeli troops amid reports the military was withdrawing, sirens blared in Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip early Wednesday after five rockets were launched from the Palestinian enclave.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel; Myra Noveck from Jerusalem; and Iyad Abuheweila from Gaza City.