In Nur Shams and Tulkarem, Israeli incursions leave ‘nothing to salvage’
An Israeli soldier from the Kfir Brigade during a military raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp, Tulkarem, on 12 March 2025
Basel Adra reports in +972 on 5 June 2025:
Nahaya Al-Jundi remembers the terror she felt on Feb. 7, when Israeli soldiers stormed her home in Nur Shams, a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Tulkarem in the northwestern West Bank. “I peered through the window and saw a D9 bulldozer advancing toward us,” she told +972. “It tore through our garden, crushed the outer wall, then suddenly stopped just meters from our house. Behind it, I saw soldiers walk through the alleyways, swarming the buildings across from us.
“For two days, my husband, our 14-year-old daughter, and I were besieged inside our home,” Al-Jundi, 53, recalled. “When the soldiers finally forced us out, we had to walk through streets filled with mud and rubble. They made us sit on the cold dirt at the camp’s entrance, before finally letting us walk toward the city [Tulkarem].”
Once home to more than 13,000 Palestinians, Nur Shams is now a ghost town after Israel’s most aggressive military campaign against West Bank refugee camps in decades. Reports indicate near-total destruction across its dense one-square-kilometer area east of Tulkarm, with nearly every home damaged and many completely flattened to rubble.
According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the more than four-month-long assault on the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps has killed at least 13 Palestinians — including a child and two women, one eight-months pregnant — wounded dozens, and displaced over 4,200 families, totaling over 25,000 people.