Palestinians look at a damaged home at the Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarem    [Alaa Badarneh/EPA]

Ramallah, September 25 (RHC)--Two Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli military raid on a refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem, health officials report.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health said two men – Asid Abu Ali, 21, and Abdulrahman Abu Daghash, 32 – were killed by Israeli fire in Sunday’s raid, which caused heavy damage to camp infrastructure.

In its comment on the latest bloodshed, the Israeli military said it had gone into the Nour Shams refugee camp to destroy “a militant command centre and bomb-storage facility” in a building.  It said that engineering units detonated several bombs planted under roads and that armed Palestinian fighters opened fire and hurled explosives at the raiding army, causing Israeli troops to respond with live fire.

Earlier in the month, Israeli forces fatally shot 21-year-old Ayed Samih Khaled Abu Harb in the head during a raid on Nour Shams refugee camp.

Israel has been carrying out stepped-up military raids, primarily in the north of the occupied West Bank, for the past 18 months in what it says is a campaign to root out Palestinian resistance fighters and thwart future attacks.  The Israeli army has been militarily occupying the West Bank, where some three million Palestinians live, for 56 years.

In July, Israel launched one of its biggest attacks on the occupied West Bank, killing at least 12 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp and wounding about 100 others.

The raids have shown little sign of slowing the fighting and contributed to the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, the self-ruled administration over parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.