February 21, 2025
Hanno Hauenstein
Displaced from Jenin and Tulkarem, Palestinian residents say Israel is waging a deliberate campaign to make the northern refugee camps unlivable.
Hanno Hauenstein
Displaced from Jenin and Tulkarem, Palestinian residents say Israel is waging a deliberate campaign to make the northern refugee camps unlivable.
Smokes rises above Jenin refugee camp during an Israeli military
operation to crack down on armed resistance, January 24, 2025. (Wahaj
Bani Moufleh/Activestills)
Sameera Abu Rmeleh steps over mountains of rubble and debris to reach what’s left of her home in Jenin refugee camp. It’s a cold, rainy day in the northern West Bank, and the camp is almost unrecognizable. Smashed concrete, burned-out cars, bullet casings, and the lifeless bodies of stray dogs line the streets as far as the eye can see. About 100 meters away, Israeli bulldozers and armored vehicles move around with purpose.
“What is happening now is much worse than the Second Intifada,” Abu Rmeleh says. “It’s just like Gaza — none of the houses in the camp are livable anymore. But we won’t go anywhere. We’re ready to live in tents if necessary. We’ve done it before.”
Abu Rmeleh is one of 20,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes in Jenin camp in recent weeks as a result of an ongoing Israeli military operation in the area. Taking what little they could carry, families fled on foot in the early days of the invasion along a dirt road, torn up by Israeli bulldozers, while soldiers choked off movement in and out of the camp.
Since then, roads throughout the camp have been gutted, including key access routes to Jenin Government Hospital. Israeli forces have also destroyed water, sewage, and telecommunications infrastructure, and even leveled an entire residential block through controlled detonations.
Now in its fifth week, “Operation Iron Wall” has since expanded to three more refugee camps in the northern West Bank, displacing an additional 20,000 people from Tulkarem camp, Nur Shams camp, and Al-Far’a camp. The Israeli military claims to be targeting armed resistance groups in these areas, but has produced meager evidence of its achievements in this regard. And as soldiers lay waste to civilian infrastructure on the ground, fighter jets and drones drop missiles from the sky.
Like many others displaced from Jenin camp, Abu Rmeleh’s family is staying with friends and relatives in the adjacent city. But even outside the camp, safety is a fragile concept. Residents fear Israeli retaliation for sheltering those displaced by the assault. Israeli snipers are positioned on rooftops in and around the camp, overlooking the ruins. Recent reports indicate that the army has given troops in the West Bank wide latitude to fire at anything and anyone deemed “suspicious.”
Abu Rmeleh is aware of these risks, but shrugs when I ask if she’s worried she’ll be shot for returning to the camp to retrieve some of her belongings. “I don’t care,” she says. “I’m already dead.”
Nearby, a teenager named Adham appears equally unperturbed. During the current assault on the camp, Israeli forces have destroyed his family’s house and killed his 17-year-old friend, Mohammed. Standing before the ruins of a house, he shakes a spray can, leaving fresh graffiti on the wreckage. Around him, some of the demolished buildings have already been tagged by Israeli soldiers with the nationalist Hebrew slogan ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ — an echo of similar scenes in Gaza.
Noticing my photographer and I standing on the empty road inside the camp, Adham hands us a leaflet that the Israeli military had distributed here. Printed in Arabic, it reads: “Terrorism destroyed the camp. Reject the militants. They are the reason for the destruction. You are the ones who pay the price for your security and a better life.”
For many in Jenin, this message is neither new nor convincing. Most of the camp’s residents are descendants of families expelled from the Haifa region by Zionist militias and Israeli forces in the Nakba of 1948. Over the decades, Jenin has become an epicenter of Palestinian militancy and resistance, its streets battered by repeated Israeli invasions and sieges — most notably during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, when Israeli bombardment and clashes with resistance fighters ravaged the camp.
After a six-week campaign by the Palestinian Authority’s security forces to crack down on armed groups and reassert control of the camp, Israel’s defense minister has framed this latest Israeli operation as applying “lessons learned” from Gaza. And Israel is now reportedly considering making its presence in the camp permanent.
‘What’s happening here is a smaller version of Gaza’
At the edge of the camp, the entrance to Jenin Government Hospital is marked by a mural of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who Israeli forces shot dead in 2022 while she covered a previous military incursion into the camp. Inside the hospital, Dr. Mustafa Hamarsheh, the medical director, describes an increasingly impossible situation.
“Many of our 500 staff members can’t even reach the hospital,” he explains: unless they arrive in an ambulance, Israeli troops frequently stop them at checkpoints, search them, and often turn them away. During the early days of the incursion, several medical workers were wounded when soldiers surrounded the hospital, besieging the facility. The military has since withdrawn from the premises, but fear lingers.
“Most patients are simply too afraid to try to get here,” Hamarsheh says. “Our capacity today is down 50 percent.”
Since the start of 2025, Israeli forces have killed at least 70 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 10 children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. In Jenin alone, 38 have been killed, including a 70-year-old friend of Hamarsheh who had fled the camp after the incursion but returned to check on his home.
“His age was unmistakable; he was clearly no fighter,” Hamarsheh says. “Yet when he reached his house, Israeli forces killed him. He had a bullet wound to the abdomen and was left there [bleeding out] for an hour. No ambulance could reach him; they simply couldn’t get through.”
Blocking ambulances is routine, Hamarsheh explains. Medics are forced to wait at checkpoints, causing patients to bleed out before they can be evacuated. The destruction of roads and infrastructure only compounds the crisis.
“What’s happening here is simply a smaller version of Gaza,” he says. “A deliberate campaign to destroy, make life unlivable, and send a message to everyone in the camp and the city: leave. Get out of the West Bank. Go somewhere else.”
After navigating our way through the streets around Jenin Government Hospital, my photographer and I decide to try entering the western side of the camp — the so-called “new camp.” Here, too, Israeli military jeeps prowl the perimeter, engines roaring as they sweep the streets. As we approach, residents warn us about a sniper in this area.
At the edge of the camp, the owner of a small mini-market — who was displaced from inside the camp but now runs his shop on its outer border — spots our press vests and waves us inside the apartment behind the shop. It belongs to his mother, who sits nearby.
Her voice cracks as she recounts what happened to her daughter on one of the first days of the incursion: she had stepped out of a side street near the shop, straight into the path of Israeli soldiers who shot a bullet that tore through her arm. Surgeons patched it up with platinum plates, but she’ll never be able to move her hand again, the older woman says, swiping through photos of the girl’s shredded arm.
Suddenly we hear gunfire. Five, maybe six shots ring out right outside the shop. We jump up. The family bolts toward the back of the apartment, and we follow. The sound — loud and piercing — indicates that the shots came from just meters away.
According to an exchange in a local WhatsApp group, Israeli forces were firing at people trying to cross back into the camp to collect their belongings. Not long after, another person on a bicycle tries to enter and is met with another burst of gunfire, which evades him.
For about three hours, we remain inside the apartment behind the mini-market, sheltering with the Palestinian family. Outside, the streets remain still, but the tension is palpable. After some coordination, Red Crescent workers finally escort us out of the camp.
‘We’re on our own’
By the end of January, Israel’s military operation had expanded well beyond Jenin. On Jan. 29, an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded neighborhood in the village of Tammun near Al-Far’a camp, killing at least 10 Palestinians. Shortly thereafter, Israeli forces raided Qalqilya and its outskirts, escalating the offensive and tightening control over all major districts in the northern West Bank.
In Tulkarem, which borders the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, the situation is no less volatile. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, bulldozers and drones have torn through the refugee camp time and again, damaging roads, homes, and shopfronts. The expansion of “Operation Iron Wall” in recent weeks has displaced three-quarters of the camp’s population.
I visit the area for the third time since October 7, joining the German NGO Medico. This time, Medico’s local partners — members of Jadayel, the Palestinian Center for Art and Culture — are distributing blankets and pillows to recently displaced families here. They operate independently of the Palestinian Authority, citing its bureaucracy as an obstacle that unnecessarily delays the distribution of aid.
Along the way, I meet Muayyad Shaaban, the head of the PA’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission. He insists the PA is doing what it can, distributing 400 to 500 meals a day to displaced families from the camp. But he doesn’t hesitate to call the assault what he believes it really is. “This is not a security operation, but a political one,” he says, arguing that most of those killed and wounded in the camps had nothing to do with armed resistance. “All this is part of Netanyahu’s gift to the far right in return for the Gaza ceasefire: to give [Bezalel] Smotrich whatever he wants.”
Shaaban suggests the ongoing military operation across the northern West Bank is in reality laying the groundwork for something much larger: annexation. And the pieces are certainly lining up. An intensification of state-backed settler violence has forced over 50 rural Palestinian communities to flee their land since October 7, and settlers established over 40 new outposts in the same period.
Meanwhile, one of Donald Trump’s first moves upon returning to the White House was to overturn the Biden administration’s sanctions on Amana, a major settler development organization. These days, there is growing suspicion among Palestinians that Washington could soon formally recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, thus acknowledging on the international stage what has long been an Israeli policy of de facto annexation.
At a shelter center in Shweikeh, a northern suburb of Tulkarem, a man named Bahazat Dheileh describes the mounting difficulties of getting supplies to those in need. The most urgent requests among displaced families, he says, are for baby formula and diapers.
According to Dheileh, Israeli forces have been preventing families from taking anything with them as they flee the camp. This has made an already dire humanitarian situation even worse, along with Israel’s crippling of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which has caused aid distribution to become more fragmented than ever.
Not far from here, in the back garden of his brother’s house, Abdellatif Sudani stands with a vacant stare. Three weeks ago, he finally left Tulkarem camp with his son and daughter. He had insisted on staying through every previous Israeli incursion, ignoring the warnings to leave, but this time was different. “There were rumors the army was planning to stay,” he says.
But that wasn’t what made him leave; it was his children who convinced him. “Who’s going to protect us?” he asks, his voice flat. “We’re on our own.”
“What is happening now is much worse than the Second Intifada,” Abu Rmeleh says. “It’s just like Gaza — none of the houses in the camp are livable anymore. But we won’t go anywhere. We’re ready to live in tents if necessary. We’ve done it before.”
Abu Rmeleh is one of 20,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes in Jenin camp in recent weeks as a result of an ongoing Israeli military operation in the area. Taking what little they could carry, families fled on foot in the early days of the invasion along a dirt road, torn up by Israeli bulldozers, while soldiers choked off movement in and out of the camp.
Since then, roads throughout the camp have been gutted, including key access routes to Jenin Government Hospital. Israeli forces have also destroyed water, sewage, and telecommunications infrastructure, and even leveled an entire residential block through controlled detonations.
Now in its fifth week, “Operation Iron Wall” has since expanded to three more refugee camps in the northern West Bank, displacing an additional 20,000 people from Tulkarem camp, Nur Shams camp, and Al-Far’a camp. The Israeli military claims to be targeting armed resistance groups in these areas, but has produced meager evidence of its achievements in this regard. And as soldiers lay waste to civilian infrastructure on the ground, fighter jets and drones drop missiles from the sky.
Like many others displaced from Jenin camp, Abu Rmeleh’s family is staying with friends and relatives in the adjacent city. But even outside the camp, safety is a fragile concept. Residents fear Israeli retaliation for sheltering those displaced by the assault. Israeli snipers are positioned on rooftops in and around the camp, overlooking the ruins. Recent reports indicate that the army has given troops in the West Bank wide latitude to fire at anything and anyone deemed “suspicious.”
Abu Rmeleh is aware of these risks, but shrugs when I ask if she’s worried she’ll be shot for returning to the camp to retrieve some of her belongings. “I don’t care,” she says. “I’m already dead.”
Nearby, a teenager named Adham appears equally unperturbed. During the current assault on the camp, Israeli forces have destroyed his family’s house and killed his 17-year-old friend, Mohammed. Standing before the ruins of a house, he shakes a spray can, leaving fresh graffiti on the wreckage. Around him, some of the demolished buildings have already been tagged by Israeli soldiers with the nationalist Hebrew slogan ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ — an echo of similar scenes in Gaza.
Noticing my photographer and I standing on the empty road inside the camp, Adham hands us a leaflet that the Israeli military had distributed here. Printed in Arabic, it reads: “Terrorism destroyed the camp. Reject the militants. They are the reason for the destruction. You are the ones who pay the price for your security and a better life.”
For many in Jenin, this message is neither new nor convincing. Most of the camp’s residents are descendants of families expelled from the Haifa region by Zionist militias and Israeli forces in the Nakba of 1948. Over the decades, Jenin has become an epicenter of Palestinian militancy and resistance, its streets battered by repeated Israeli invasions and sieges — most notably during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, when Israeli bombardment and clashes with resistance fighters ravaged the camp.
After a six-week campaign by the Palestinian Authority’s security forces to crack down on armed groups and reassert control of the camp, Israel’s defense minister has framed this latest Israeli operation as applying “lessons learned” from Gaza. And Israel is now reportedly considering making its presence in the camp permanent.
‘What’s happening here is a smaller version of Gaza’
At the edge of the camp, the entrance to Jenin Government Hospital is marked by a mural of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who Israeli forces shot dead in 2022 while she covered a previous military incursion into the camp. Inside the hospital, Dr. Mustafa Hamarsheh, the medical director, describes an increasingly impossible situation.
“Many of our 500 staff members can’t even reach the hospital,” he explains: unless they arrive in an ambulance, Israeli troops frequently stop them at checkpoints, search them, and often turn them away. During the early days of the incursion, several medical workers were wounded when soldiers surrounded the hospital, besieging the facility. The military has since withdrawn from the premises, but fear lingers.
“Most patients are simply too afraid to try to get here,” Hamarsheh says. “Our capacity today is down 50 percent.”
Since the start of 2025, Israeli forces have killed at least 70 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 10 children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. In Jenin alone, 38 have been killed, including a 70-year-old friend of Hamarsheh who had fled the camp after the incursion but returned to check on his home.
“His age was unmistakable; he was clearly no fighter,” Hamarsheh says. “Yet when he reached his house, Israeli forces killed him. He had a bullet wound to the abdomen and was left there [bleeding out] for an hour. No ambulance could reach him; they simply couldn’t get through.”
Blocking ambulances is routine, Hamarsheh explains. Medics are forced to wait at checkpoints, causing patients to bleed out before they can be evacuated. The destruction of roads and infrastructure only compounds the crisis.
“What’s happening here is simply a smaller version of Gaza,” he says. “A deliberate campaign to destroy, make life unlivable, and send a message to everyone in the camp and the city: leave. Get out of the West Bank. Go somewhere else.”
After navigating our way through the streets around Jenin Government Hospital, my photographer and I decide to try entering the western side of the camp — the so-called “new camp.” Here, too, Israeli military jeeps prowl the perimeter, engines roaring as they sweep the streets. As we approach, residents warn us about a sniper in this area.
At the edge of the camp, the owner of a small mini-market — who was displaced from inside the camp but now runs his shop on its outer border — spots our press vests and waves us inside the apartment behind the shop. It belongs to his mother, who sits nearby.
Her voice cracks as she recounts what happened to her daughter on one of the first days of the incursion: she had stepped out of a side street near the shop, straight into the path of Israeli soldiers who shot a bullet that tore through her arm. Surgeons patched it up with platinum plates, but she’ll never be able to move her hand again, the older woman says, swiping through photos of the girl’s shredded arm.
Suddenly we hear gunfire. Five, maybe six shots ring out right outside the shop. We jump up. The family bolts toward the back of the apartment, and we follow. The sound — loud and piercing — indicates that the shots came from just meters away.
According to an exchange in a local WhatsApp group, Israeli forces were firing at people trying to cross back into the camp to collect their belongings. Not long after, another person on a bicycle tries to enter and is met with another burst of gunfire, which evades him.
For about three hours, we remain inside the apartment behind the mini-market, sheltering with the Palestinian family. Outside, the streets remain still, but the tension is palpable. After some coordination, Red Crescent workers finally escort us out of the camp.
‘We’re on our own’
By the end of January, Israel’s military operation had expanded well beyond Jenin. On Jan. 29, an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded neighborhood in the village of Tammun near Al-Far’a camp, killing at least 10 Palestinians. Shortly thereafter, Israeli forces raided Qalqilya and its outskirts, escalating the offensive and tightening control over all major districts in the northern West Bank.
In Tulkarem, which borders the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, the situation is no less volatile. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, bulldozers and drones have torn through the refugee camp time and again, damaging roads, homes, and shopfronts. The expansion of “Operation Iron Wall” in recent weeks has displaced three-quarters of the camp’s population.
I visit the area for the third time since October 7, joining the German NGO Medico. This time, Medico’s local partners — members of Jadayel, the Palestinian Center for Art and Culture — are distributing blankets and pillows to recently displaced families here. They operate independently of the Palestinian Authority, citing its bureaucracy as an obstacle that unnecessarily delays the distribution of aid.
Along the way, I meet Muayyad Shaaban, the head of the PA’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission. He insists the PA is doing what it can, distributing 400 to 500 meals a day to displaced families from the camp. But he doesn’t hesitate to call the assault what he believes it really is. “This is not a security operation, but a political one,” he says, arguing that most of those killed and wounded in the camps had nothing to do with armed resistance. “All this is part of Netanyahu’s gift to the far right in return for the Gaza ceasefire: to give [Bezalel] Smotrich whatever he wants.”
Shaaban suggests the ongoing military operation across the northern West Bank is in reality laying the groundwork for something much larger: annexation. And the pieces are certainly lining up. An intensification of state-backed settler violence has forced over 50 rural Palestinian communities to flee their land since October 7, and settlers established over 40 new outposts in the same period.
Meanwhile, one of Donald Trump’s first moves upon returning to the White House was to overturn the Biden administration’s sanctions on Amana, a major settler development organization. These days, there is growing suspicion among Palestinians that Washington could soon formally recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, thus acknowledging on the international stage what has long been an Israeli policy of de facto annexation.
At a shelter center in Shweikeh, a northern suburb of Tulkarem, a man named Bahazat Dheileh describes the mounting difficulties of getting supplies to those in need. The most urgent requests among displaced families, he says, are for baby formula and diapers.
According to Dheileh, Israeli forces have been preventing families from taking anything with them as they flee the camp. This has made an already dire humanitarian situation even worse, along with Israel’s crippling of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which has caused aid distribution to become more fragmented than ever.
Not far from here, in the back garden of his brother’s house, Abdellatif Sudani stands with a vacant stare. Three weeks ago, he finally left Tulkarem camp with his son and daughter. He had insisted on staying through every previous Israeli incursion, ignoring the warnings to leave, but this time was different. “There were rumors the army was planning to stay,” he says.
But that wasn’t what made him leave; it was his children who convinced him. “Who’s going to protect us?” he asks, his voice flat. “We’re on our own.”
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