A drone strike in Jenin kills three, and the three accounts of who died do not match

An Israeli drone killed three Palestinians near Jenin on Friday afternoon, in what Al Jazeera and Asharq Al-Awsat’s English service both described as a rare use of Israeli air power in the occupied West Bank. The military said it “eliminated” three people, one of whom it described as a Hamas operative along with two accomplices. Per the Times of Israel, the Shin Bet designated the target, Qais Bitawi, as the head of Hamas’s activities in the Jenin refugee camp; ToI’s own framing called him a former senior cell member. The operational account is single-sourced to the IDF: troops and the police’s Yamam unit launched an operation on Shin Bet information, and the air force struck after Bitawi and two others were spotted exiting a car next to a structure. Wire copy has the strike hitting the car.

Hamas condemned the strike but did not claim Bitawi. Palestinian Islamic Jihad said in a statement that he was a senior operative of its armed wing. The political reaction was immediate and on the record: Netanyahu congratulated the IDF on X for the “successful thwarting of the terrorists in Jenin,” while Defence Minister Israel Katz praised the army, police and security forces and called the strike among the “fruits of the offensive and proactive policy we are leading in Judea and Samaria.” “We do not wait for terrorism,” Katz said. In Gaza the same day, the ToI liveblog reported the IDF killing Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives while the United States pushes for strikes to end to advance the Board of Peace’s disarmament plan.

Assessment: Two things are worth separating. The method is the news: air power in the West Bank remains exceptional, and both Netanyahu and Katz moved within hours to own it politically, two months from an election in which the far-right flank is openly bidding against him. The factional attribution is the caution: an Israeli identification of a target as Hamas, a Hamas silence, and an Islamic Jihad claim are three claims, not a resolution, and none is independently verified. Note also the unreconciled detail of whether the men were in the car or beside it — a small discrepancy, but it marks how much of this rests on one spokesperson’s account.