In first since Oslo, Israel seizing land for army base inside West Bank city
View of the damage caused by an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on 14 January 2026
Shatha Yaish reports in +972 on 27 May 2026:
After the Israeli army demolished his home inside the Jenin refugee camp, Khaled Safouri took solace in the fact that he still owned a small plot of land in the adjacent city of Jenin, where he hoped to build a new house. But even that may soon be taken from him.
Earlier this month, Israeli authorities issued a seizure order for Safouri’s land and more than seven additional dunams in Jenin’s Al-Jabariyat neighborhood, a hilltop area overlooking Jenin refugee camp. The order comes amid Israel’s more than year-long military campaign in the northern West Bank — dubbed “Operation Iron Wall” — during which the army has occupied refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams, displaced up to 45,000 Palestinians, and carried out vast destruction of civilian infrastructure.
For 50-year-old Safouri, a third-generation Nakba refugee whose family was originally displaced from Saffurriya, near Nazareth, in 1948, the seizure order feels like “a bad omen.”
While Israeli land seizure orders are certainly not uncommon in the occupied West Bank, this case has alarmed residents and human rights organizations because the plots are located in Area A. This is the section of the West Bank where, under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority officially maintains full civil and security control; in Area B, the PA must coordinate security with Israel, while Area C, which comprises more than 60 percent of the territory, remains under full Israeli control.