Five people were killed by Israeli army fire in Jenin, the ministry said, during an incursion by a large number of armoured vehicles into the city, which was recently the scene of the deadliest Israeli raid in the West Bank in almost 20 years.

Medical sources told AFP 15 people were wounded, while witnesses reported that an Israeli drone had carried out an air strike on Jenin's refugee camp.

Other witnesses said on Saturday that the Israeli army had surrounded Jenin's public hospital and the Ibn Sina clinic, and that soldiers were searching ambulances.

They also reported heavy fighting with automatic weapons.

The Israeli army said it had carried out "counterterrorism activities" overnight in the Jenin refugee camp, a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups in the north of the territory.

It said it had arrested the suspected perpetrator of an attack that killed two Israelis in August.

A 25-year-old doctor was killed on Saturday outside his home in Qabatiya, near Jenin, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

A Palestinian was also killed in El-Bireh, near the city of Ramallah, and another during an Israeli army raid on a village south of Nablus, it said.

The West Bank has seen a surge in violence since the October 7 cross-border attack on Israel by Hamas, in which militants from the Gaza Strip killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.

Israel has since responded with a bombing and land campaign in Gaza, killing nearly 15,000 people, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas government.

Over the same period, more than 230 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers, according to the Palestinian health ministry.