Israeli soldiers’ excrement in cooking pots: When the IDF took over hundreds of houses in the West Bank
Damage caused by Israeli soldiers inside the Amouri family’s home in June 2025
Amira Hass reports in Haaretz on 28 July 2025:
Uprooted doors, broken cupboards, overturned shelves with their contents scattered across the floor, filthy toilets, broken cisterns, heaps of clothing and mattresses in disarray, and blankets smeared with feces – these are the scenes that greeted the Amouri family when they returned to their home in Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. They had been forced to leave after Israeli soldiers turned their house into a temporary base.
“I had to run the washing machine for 24 hours straight,” said Dalal Amouri, the mother of the family. “I had to throw out some items, they were so filthy. We found meat taken from the freezer and tossed on the floor. The bathroom was so dirty, we couldn’t even go inside.”
Their house was not the only one. In the last two weeks of June, during Israel’s war with Iran, the military occupied over 250 homes and apartments in refugee camps, villages, and some urban neighborhoods throughout the West Bank. At least 1,350 residents reside in these homes. Most were evicted – usually in the middle of the night. In some cases, the military remained in the homes for only a few hours; in most, the occupation lasted anywhere from two to 11 days.
During these periods, soldiers carried out brief raids on nearby houses. Entire villages, or specific neighborhoods within them, were placed under curfew or strict movement restrictions.
Only a few of the occupied homes were vacant. In some instances, families were confined to a single room while armed soldiers guarded the door. More often, the residents were forced to leave altogether, and the military used the homes as bases – and, in many cases, as detention and interrogation centers for dozens of men.
“The soldiers tore strips of cloth from our clothing and used them to blindfold the detainees,” said Subhiya Hamadeh, also a resident of Balata. One of her neighbors, who had been detained, told her that he was kept in a restroom with six or seven other people for two or three hours before being interrogated and released.
The Israeli army has long practiced turning homes into military positions, outposts, and sniper stations. But occupying such a large number of homes simultaneously across so many areas of the West Bank is unprecedented. According to a preliminary report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and information that reached Haaretz, most of the affected homes – around 150 – were in towns and villages in the Jenin district, and some 800 people have had to leave them.
According to that same report, in Hebron, including in the H2 area (under full Israeli control), the IDF occupied at least 25 residential units, and the rooftop of a school. Some 300 people had been living in those properties. Dozens of soldiers were stationed in each occupied home. According to testimonies collected by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, UN researchers, and Haaretz, families who returned home found their belongings broken, furniture overturned or destroyed, and doors ripped off. Mattresses, towels, and blankets had been used or soiled. Some reported hygiene products and food were consumed or tampered with.
The aftermath of the army’s takeover of the home of the Amouri family
Some families reported that their water supply had been completely drained. Because of Israeli-imposed quotas on water, Palestinian municipalities and companies deliver it to neighborhoods on rotation, and household store it in rooftop tanks. In higher elevations or during summer months, families often have to buy water from trucks at three times the municipal rate. “We didn’t find a single drop of water left in the rooftop tanks,” said Dalal Amouri
The Amouri i family documented everything upon their return. “We learned from neighbors that when the soldiers left, on the night of June 19, they set fire to their garbage pile just outside our front door,” said Ahmed, Dalal’s son. “If the civil defense teams [firefighters] hadn’t arrived quickly, the whole house would have burned down.”
Inside, the family discovered a dozen fans that soldiers had collected from neighboring homes. When Ahmed took them back to their owners, one neighbor told him that a soldier had said: “You have air conditioning. You don’t need fans.”
Ahmed’s two-year-old son saw the soldiers and burst into tears, asking to play with one of their guns. “Our children – all they know is weapons,” Ahmed said. His mother added: “The first word our children say is ‘takh’ – shooting. We used to know Jews and wanted to live with them. But the little ones? They only know the ones who shoot.”
Like others, the Amouri family also reported missing valuables: two gold rings, six expensive watches (cheaper ones were found tossed on the floor), precious stones, a gold pen, and perfumes.
In some homes with prepaid electricity meters, once the credit ran out, soldiers reportedly called the evicted families and demanded that they remotely top up the account so the soldiers could continue using the electricity.
Numerous testimonies described scenes of garbage and filth left behind – including feces in cooking pots and on blankets, and bottles filled with urine rolling on the floor. Palestinians (and this reporter) first encountered such practices during the Second Intifada in the West Bank and again during the 2009 war in Gaza.
In each house, families spent days cleaning and removing waste after the soldiers left. Like the Amouris, other families reported stolen money, jewelry, and personal items.
“An Israeli Flag on a Power Line”
The Haaretz investigation found that the first homes occupied by the Israeli army during its June operation were in the village of Nazlet Zeid, part of the Jenin Governorate. On the afternoon of Friday, June 13, military jeeps entered the village, and soldiers ordered the residents of two villas to evacuate “within ten minutes.”
According to the village council, the soldiers remained for 11 days, during which the village was under curfew. In Zeita, part of the Tul Karm Governorate, soldiers stayed in three homes for ten days, until June 24, according to the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department (NAD) data. In the town of Ya’bad, three homes were turned into military posts between June 24 and 25, while soldiers raided 113 homes during a curfew imposed on the town.
In the Nablus-area refugee camps of New Askar and Balata, the army occupied at least 24 homes, according to data from B’Tselem and the camps’ Popular Services Committees (PSC). On June 16, at 2:00 A.M., a large military force entered New Askar, home to roughly 6,500 residents. PSC members told Haaretz that soldiers arrived on foot from the direction of the Elon Moreh settlement to the east, while others entered by vehicle through the camp’s two main entrances.
Alongside seven residential apartments, the army also took over a public building that houses the PSC offices. “We knew from the neighbors that soldiers were staying in the building, and they also raised an Israeli flag on one of its power lines,” said Talal Abu Kishek. When the soldiers left two days later, they had left behind “unbelievable quantities of garbage. Filth everywhere,” he said.
His colleague, Mohammed Abu Kishek, added: “The soldiers appear to have used whatever they could find to sit or lie on – even the stretchers we had in storage. Three doors were ripped off, and all our documents were scattered. It took us a week to reorganize everything.”
Over the course of those two days, soldiers broke into around 100 homes in the camp. In the home of Khadijah and A’atef Kharoushi in New Askar, 12 family members live under one roof. According to Khadijah, “The soldiers came just before the call to morning prayer. They threw us out of the house. We went to neighbors, but the soldiers wouldn’t let us stay there either.”
They then demanded that her husband call their son – a Nablus resident – and tell him to come immediately. He arrived with his wife and their four young children. Soldiers questioned him, one of his sons, and another of the Kharoushi grandchildren. The grandson told Haaretz he was asked about someone who had been killed by soldiers. “When I didn’t know the answer, the soldier beat me,” he said. Like other families in Askar, the Kharoushi’swere ordered to leave the camp.
“We came back only when neighbors told us the soldiers were gone,” said A’atef, also known as Abu al Abed “What we had to throw out from the house could have fill an entire truck. We even threw out the mattresses they used. They tore out three doors. They used everything they could, in the kitchen and the bathroom.” He and his wife were spared the scenes of filth: “My son and his friends came to clean up before we were allowed back in,” he said.
A few hundred shekels and a caged goldfinch went missing – though Abu al-Abed refrained from directly blaming the soldiers. One thing everyone noticed, however, was how the family’s animals were treated. “They pampered the horse, the doves, and the hens we keep , outside the house,” he said. “Neighbors saw them come out to feed them.”
Abd al-Rahim Amouri, a former senior employee at the government hospital in Nablus, also noted that the soldiers treated his family’s rabbits – kept on the roof of their Balata home – with care. “We were worried about them, but when we returned, we saw the soldiers had fed and watered them,” he said.
The way the soldiers treated the home itself, and its residents, was another matter entirely. “When they started banging and kicking the door early on June 18, I came out to meet them,” Amouri said. “I asked them to enter quietly. I tried to be reasonable, to have a dialogue. I even offered them coffee.”
But the soldiers entered aggressively and began destroying household items.
“Maybe it was their first time doing something like this and they felt they had to prove something,” Amouri said. He added that the officer in charge did try to calm the soldiers. “He asked how I was doing. I told him: ‘You took me out of my home 20 years ago, and 50 years ago. You expelled my family 78 years ago. How do you think I’m doing?'”
One of the first things the soldiers did was hang an Israeli flag on the exterior of the front door. His son Ahmed recalled what happened next: “They gave us two options: either all 13 of us get locked together in one room for 72 hours, or we leave the house.”
“Where will I go?”
In another home in Balata, belonging to the Hamadeh family – where 17 people live across two floors – Israeli soldiers took control of the building at 3:00 A.M. on Wednesday, June 18. “We heard the doorbell ring. I told my husband the army was here. We had just stepped out of the room when they broke down the door and were already inside,” recounted Subhiya, originally Haj Yahya and a native of the West Bank (Israeli) triangle town of Taybeh, who spoke to the soldiers in Hebrew.
According to her, one soldier punched her husband, Ali, in the face. Dozens of soldiers flooded the home. Some were wearing masks, others not. “There was a junior officer downstairs, and a senior officer who went up to the second floor,” she said. Ali, who had worked for 21 years at a laundry in Herzliya, understood everything the soldiers were saying.
“When they came in, they approached me and said, ‘Listen, you need to leave the house.’ I asked, ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ One of them said, ‘Wherever you go. Come back on Friday.’ I said, ‘Let me take something with me.’ The officer said, ‘Quickly, quickly, two minutes.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? The kids are upstairs.’ He told me, ‘Come with me to the children.'”
When Ali went upstairs, some of the children and grandchildren were still asleep. He said he saw an officer push one of his sleeping granddaughters on the head with his foot. Ali gently woke the children and told them not to be afraid and to pack a change of clothes. His wife, still downstairs, heard them crying. When the family exited into the dark, a surveillance camera captured the moment: the glare of military jeep headlights, armed soldiers stationed along the narrow street, beside locked iron doors – and in the center, one of Subhiya and Ali’s sons with two of their grandchildren, one of them holding a cat.
The soldiers left the house on Thursday at 10:00 P.M. The family returned early the next morning, on Friday, having spent the night scattered across three homes out of the camp. nearby homes. “We’re still suffering from the soldiers’ presence here,” Ali told Haaretz two weeks ago “They took food from us. We found mice in the house. After a few days, we started itching. UNRWA workers came and sprayed our bedrooms.”
Three thousand shekels disappeared from a closet belonging to Ali’s sister, who lives with them. The money had been set aside for a charity organization she is part of and was meant for distribution to people in need. Fortunately, the family had managed to take their gold jewelry with them when they were evicted.
When Haaretz asked the IDF how many buildings and apartments had been turned into temporary military bases, the IDF Spokesperson declined to answer directly. Instead, the office issued the following statement:
“In accordance with command directives and within the bounds of the law, IDF forces have temporarily seized various properties, including private homes and buildings, for short periods of time. These seizures were carried out for clear operational reasons, following proper procedures and with the approval of authorized officials, while striving to minimize disruption to the residents’ daily lives as much as possible.
“Claims of property damage, unsanitary conduct, improper use of private belongings, or physical harm to residents are not known to the IDF. If specific complaints are submitted, including detailed information such as locations and times, they will be thoroughly investigated. Such incidents contradict IDF values and, if found to have occurred, will be handled with severity.”
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