THREE people were killed in an overnight Israeli strike on a home in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said today.

It said the strike had hit the Tulkarem refugee camp, a built-up residential area dating back to the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation. 

The Israeli military said its aircraft had struck “several” militants in Tulkarem as ground forces continued a search for buried explosives.

The West Bank has seen a surge of Israeli violence since the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 last year. 

Israeli forces carry out near-daily raids in the West Bank, often provoking retaliation by Palestinian resistance fighters. 

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least 637 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since the start of the current Gaza crisis.

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the six-day war of 1967. The Palestinians want all three for a future state, but Israel has built scores of settlements across the West Bank that house over 500,000 Jewish settlers. 

They have Israeli citizenship, while the three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority administering population centres.

Meanwhile, fears of a wider regional war following Israel’s assassinations of top leaders of Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement have heightened the calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

But Egyptian officials close to negotiations on a truce say that Hamas won’t agree to the current proposal for a number of reasons. One appears to be Israel’s insistence of the Israelis that it won’t ending the fighting until Hamas is completely destroyed.

Mediators were scheduled to meet in Cairo tonight and on Friday for more talks on the proposal, before officially submitting it to Hamas.

The efforts to achieve a ceasefire appear most remote for the Gaza residents continually displaced by the fighting.

The UN humanitarian office is warning that the latest mass evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military are pushing Palestinians into overcrowded and unsafe areas along the enclave’s coast.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that Israel has issued 11 evacuation orders so far this month, affecting about 250,000 people. 

Before August, he said, 90 per cent of Gaza’s 2.1 million people had been displaced at least once since October 7.

Mr Dujarric told reporters that the Israeli orders have also cut off sections of the main Salah al-Din road, a key route for delivering humanitarian aid.