Israel is already doing in the West Bank what it threatens to do in Gaza
Residents evacuate Al-Faraa refugee camp, West Bank, February 2025
The Haaretz lead editorial on 24 February 2025:
On Sunday [23 February], Defense Minister Israel Katz proudly announced the goal of the army’s operation in the West Bank – expelling residents of refugee camps.
In the Gaza Strip, the government is dreaming of a population transfer, but in the West Bank, it’s already doing it. Katz even said he had “ordered” that the 40,000 Palestinians already expelled from the Jenin, Tul Karm and Nur Shams refugee camps not be allowed to return for at least a year.
Katz’s statements completely contradict the Israel Defense Forces’ official claim – which it has been making ever since the West Bank operation began – that it isn’t evicting the population there (as reported by Hagar Shezaf on Sunday).
Refugee camp residents who have been pushed out of from their homes are taking refuge wherever they can in nearby towns and villages. Dozens are sleeping on floors in temporary shelters run by local volunteers. Tens of thousands were forced to leave their homes so quickly that they didn’t have time to take clothes, medicine or money with them. Their children haven’t been in school for weeks.
The army, which is demolishing homes in the refugee camps to widen the roads, has now decided to make the situation even harder. After last week’s attempted terror attack in central Israel, it brought tanks into the Jenin refugee camp for the first time in 20 years. A campaign by settler leaders, who have been pushing for such steps for more than a year, has borne fruit. The settlers have managed to turn the West Bank into a war zone in every respect.
Some of the displaced Palestinians acknowledged that they fled out of fear. But others described how soldiers forced them to leave their homes. One family said soldiers entered their home in the middle of the night and threw them out. A young man said soldiers used him as a human shield and then ordered him to leave the refugee camp. A blind elderly man said the army took over a building, brought him inside it and locked him in a room with another family for two days without allowing them to communicate with anybody.
For residents of the refugee camps, some of whom worked in Israel prior to October 7, 2023, army raids have become part of their daily routine over the last year. This routine includes destroying streets, evicting people from their homes and killing. But the rapid escalation in recent weeks – a kind of compensation for the far right for its grief and disappointment over the deal to bring the hostages home – has driven the residents to despair and made them fear for the future.
As usual, instead of solving the root problem of the conflict, Israel has once again proven that it understands only force and is capable only of short-term thinking. Twenty-three years after Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, Israel is still in the same lousy situation. Without a political solution, what will more violence, collective punishment, abuse of civilians and military action lead to except a cycle of violence and bloodshed and global condemnations of Israel?
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