Police’s Yamam counter-terror unit acts on intelligence provided by Shin Bet; military carries out rare airstrike against cave in Kafr Qud, from which the operatives had emerged
Officers of the Yamam counter-terrorism unit and an Israeli military airstrike killed three Palestinian terror operatives during a raid in the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qud, near Jenin, on Tuesday morning, the Israel Defense Forces and Israel Police said.
Police said that the Yamam officers operated in the village to thwart a terror cell that was planning to carry out an attack. They acted on intelligence provided by the Shin Bet, police added, and had IDF support.
According to police, Yamam snipers opened fire and killed the three operatives who had emerged from a cave in the village.
The IDF, however, said that the Yamam snipers killed two of the operatives and wounded the third.
A short while after that, the Israeli Air Force carried out an airstrike that targeted the cave from which the operatives had emerged, killing the third gunman, the IDF said.
Israeli airstrikes in the West Bank — using drones, attack helicopters, and fighter jets — had been a common occurrence in recent years, with more than 100 carried out between the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, and early 2025.
However, after a major military offensive against terror operatives was launched in the northern West Bank in January 2025, such airstrikes have become increasingly rare.
Since the start of that offensive, the IDF has remained deployed to the Jenin refugee camp, adjacent to the city of Jenin, and two refugee camps near the western border of the West Bank, Tulkarem and Nur Shams. Both are near the city of Tulkarem.
Residents of the camps have since been displaced and have not been allowed to return.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said the camps were hotbeds of terror, funded and armed by Iran, to act as another front against Israel. With the IDF deployed to the camps, “the scope of terror alerts in Judea and Samaria has dropped by 80 percent,” Katz said in August, using the government’s term for the West Bank.
Since the start of the Gaza war with the Hamas-led October 7 attack, troops have arrested over 6,000 wanted Palestinians across the West Bank, including more than 2,350 affiliated with Hamas, according to the IDF.
According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, over 1,000 West Bank Palestinians have been killed in that time. The IDF says the vast majority of them were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 62 others, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another eight members of the security forces were killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.
