The Israeli occupation military said it moved into the Nour Shams refugee camp, near the town of Tulkarem, to destroy what it described as a militant command center and bomb-storage facility in a building.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said two men — Asid Abu Ali, 21, and Abdulrahman Abu Daghash, 32 — were killed by Israeli fire. The raid caused heavy damage to roads and the suspected building.

Israel has been carrying out stepped-up military raids, primarily in the northern West Bank, for the past year and a half.

Palestinians say the raids entrench Israel’s 56-year occupation over the West Bank. The raids have shown little sign of slowing the fighting and contributed to the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, the self-rule government that administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

At least 241 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so far this year.

The bloodshed has also seen 32 Israelis, over the same period, according to an AFP tally based on official sources on both sides.

The tensions have begun to spread over the past week to the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of Palestinians have been holding daily demonstrations along the fence separating the territory from Israel.

On Saturday, Israeli airstrikes hit a militant site for the second time in as many days, after Palestinians sent incendiary balloons into Israeli farmland and Palestinian protesters threw stones and explosives at soldiers at the separation fence

The spike in violence comes during the Jewish New Year holiday season, followed by the weeklong Sukkot festival later in the month.

During Sukkot, large numbers of Jews are expected to visit Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site, the Al-Aqsa compound. The compound is often a focal point for violence.

Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.