‘Iron Wall’: How Israel is demographically re-engineering the West Bank
A view of a road in Jenin refugee camp levelled by Israeli bulldozers during Israel’s ongoing operation in the occupied West Bank on 13 February 2025
Naela Khalil writes in The New Arab on 18 February 2025:
For the first time since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, the term “expulsion” has returned to the forefront of discussions, with over 40,000 refugees from camps in the northern West Bank displaced from their homes within just a few weeks.
This is a direct result of ‘Operation Iron Wall’ launched on 21 January, which has magnified fears that Israel is attempting to re-engineer the West Bank geographically, demographically and politically – the initial stage of which is being implemented through rendering refugee camps uninhabitable.
Around 49 Palestinians have been killed and around 200 arrested since the operation began late last month. Four refugee camps – Jenin, Nur Shams, Tulkarm and Faraa – have been almost fully emptied, with thousands of refugees forced to evacuate after Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of buildings and levelled much of their infrastructure.
Palestinian political analysts say Israel’s war on Palestinian refugees began following Hamas’s attack in October last year, and that the current campaign should be viewed as a political operation rather than having a military or security-related agenda.
Walid Habbas, a researcher at the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, The New Arab’s Arabic-language sister edition, that since October 2023 Israeli officials have repeatedly said that “Israel is fighting a multi-front war, and while the most important front is Gaza, another front is the West Bank”. He added that Israel Katz, who was Israel’s foreign minister at the time but is currently defence minister, had doubled down on this, saying Israel was “entering an all-out war” in the West Bank.
“A major shift has occurred in Israel regarding everything relating to the camps and the refugees,” Habbas explained. He says since the war on Gaza began, Israelis have been calling for a review of the fact that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has not “ended” the refugee issue despite having existed for 30 years and “despite all the money it’s been given”.