Israeli army operations are making West Bank refugee camps unlivable
Residents carry their belongings in Nur al-Shams, February 2025
Hagar Shezaf reports in Haaretz on 6 March 2025:
On a small street at the entrance to the Jenin refugee camp, it’s evident that the destruction wrought by the Israeli military takes more than one form. One house has been blown up and demolished down to its foundations. Adjacent to it, another house still stands, but its walls have vanished from the sides and front. A third house’s windows bear black marks, the aftermath of an explosion or fire. Across the street, walls are riddled with bullet holes, and inside there is immense damage, likely caused during a search that left all furniture and belongings overturned.
This is the extent of destruction in a very small area at the edge of the camp. Last week, it was possible to enter this part of the camp relatively safely, a month into an army operation that saw troops destroying buildings and roads and searching every home. The widespread damage in this small portion of the camp raises many questions about the conditions at its center.
Though the army was not visible during a midday visit, the roads, now reduced to dirt tracks, stood empty after the vast majority of residents left due to the ongoing operation. Yet from one balcony, a family peeks out – a couple and their three children. They are the only ones nearby who have chosen to remain, says Yusuf [his real name is withheld due to his request], the father. “We left the camp for four days when they blew up the buildings, then returned,” he says.
“Going in and out of our house puts us in danger, but because Israel has indicated this is a prolonged operation, not just one or two days, we want to stay,” he adds, referring to Defense Minister Israel Katz’s statement that Israel will prohibit those who have evacuated – around 37,000 people, according to current estimates – from returning to the camps for the coming year.
Yusuf says the nearby explosion shattered all his home’s windows. “I covered the windows and doors with cloth because of the cold,” he explains, adding that an army drone frequently passes near their home in the evenings, calling in Arabic: “Leave the building. The [Israel] Defense Forces is here. If you leave, we won’t harm you.” But they do not leave. Under the cover of this military operation and a preceding Palestinian Authority operation, his children have not attended school for 85 days. He also has no work to go to.
The damage to this family’s home is considered incidental collateral damage. The military said that in the Jenin refugee camp alone, it had demolished 23 houses, even sharing documentation of their destruction – later updating that figure to at least 25. “From what we understand, that itself impacted another 80 houses at least that are also not habitable,” says Roland Friedrich, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, in the West Bank. “They [the buildings] are all very close together so there is structural impact on adjacent buildings.” Friedrich emphasizes that this is merely an estimate, as no agencies or observers have been allowed to enter the refugee camps since the operation began.
Due to the dense and often flimsy construction in the refugee camps, the potential for secondary destruction – damage to adjacent buildings from explosions or military vehicles – is high. The military says it demolished buildings housing terrorist assets, without specifying the exact nature of these assets. However, at least some demolitions in Jenin and other camps have explicitly been carried out to widen roads, making it easier for the military to reach the camp centers. From a hill overlooking the Jenin camp, a route created by the army is visible. In mid-February, Palestinian media reported the army’s intention to demolish 14 buildings in the Tul Karm refugee camp for a similar purpose.
Rubble in the shell of a residential building in Jenin, February 2025
An explosion at the door
In Nur al-Shams, one of two refugee camps in Tul Karm, the army has also begun demolishing buildings to open pathways. On Wednesday last week, for the first time, residents were permitted into the camp briefly to retrieve belongings from 11 homes slated for demolition. “At about 11:30 P.M., we were informed our home would be demolished,” says Amjad Al-Jabali, a camp resident and Red Crescent volunteer. “It was a shock, but God decided it would be our home.”
Haaretz’s entry into the camp revealed part of the damage caused since the operation began: large holes in building facades and widespread black soot from fires or explosions. Some of the destruction is likely the result of tactics that have already had severe consequences. On the first day of operations in Nur al-Shams, 21-year-old Rahaf al-Ashqar was killed by an explosive device soldiers had placed on her front door to force entry.
Under international law, an occupying power cannot destroy private or public property unless it is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations. “A necessary military need must be a concrete operational requirement with no reasonable alternative,” says Prof. Eliav Lieblich, a scholar of international law and humanitarian law at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. “This does not include demolition for punishment, deterrence, revenge, making an impression, or political aims, and certainly cannot include expelling residents from a specific area.”
Regarding road demolitions, Lieblich says these might be justified if credible information indicates explosives planted underneath. “On the other hand, you can’t assume in advance that every road is a potential site for explosives and thus destroy roads wholesale,” he says. “The question is what information exists at that time. And remember, since this is occupied territory, Israel has heightened obligations toward protected persons [the civilian population] to enable normal life and allow infrastructure repairs as soon as possible.”
The Israeli military announcement allowing Nur al-Shams residents to return to their homes to collect belongings limited their return until 11 A.M. While the announcement was officially directed only at owners of homes slated for demolition, other residents took advantage of it, too. On the main road, now a muddy dirt path, residents could be seen carrying bags of clothes, blankets or a television screen. When one family carrying belongings passed a street corner, shots were fired at them for no apparent reason. After 11, a military jeep sped along the dirt road that was previously paved, splashing those still standing alongside it with foul sewage water from puddles. Army bulldozers then crossed through the camp.
“You see so much destruction,” says a 50-year-old camp resident. “The soldiers break and destroy, enter houses, and tear doors off their hinges. They searched all the houses, including mine. The entire entrance to my house is blocked by piles of sand, and the whole camp is in ruins. We don’t know what the purpose of all this is. If you want a specific person, go after him. What’s the connection to me?”
This resident says his family members are refugees from the 1948 Nakba who came to Nur al-Shams from Sabbarin, a depopulated village near Haifa. He returned to his home for the first time since the operation began to pick up some clothes. One of his children moved to Europe a few months ago and has received refugee status. The father is now waiting for a few years to pass so that he can join his child there. “I wouldn’t stay here another minute,” he says. “Life in this camp isn’t life.”
The army continues to assert, despite conflicting evidence, that it does not forcibly expel residents but only allows those who wish to leave to do so. Yet declarations by Defense Minister Israel Katz that evacuees will not be permitted to return to their homes for the next year have significantly impacted the displaced.
Lieblich says that international law permits evacuating a population from a defined area only if it’s necessary for their safety or because imperative military reasons demand it. “Such needs must be genuine and cannot serve as a pretext for evacuating people to pressure any organization or for revenge,” he says. “Moreover, such an evacuation carries the responsibility of ensuring the evacuated population has somewhere reasonable to stay.” However, dozens of evacuees are currently staying in centers managed by volunteers in nearby villages. In some cases, these centers are auditoriums with numerous mattresses spread across the floor.
No one to rebuild
Lieblich says that “perhaps the most crucial point regarding evacuations is ensuring people are allowed to return immediately once the specific need has ended. If the defense minister has indeed instructed against allowing returns, it constitutes a violation of international law.”
However, according to Yusuf, a resident of the Jenin refugee camp, it would be best if evacuees began returning soon, fearing they might otherwise have nowhere left to return to. “We believe people living on the camp’s outskirts can return,” he says. “Especially if they want to protect their homes from being taken over by Israelis.”
The question of when residents can return is intertwined with who will rehabilitate the refugee camps – and how. The current wave of destruction, whose full extent is still unknown, follows several previous waves of infrastructure damage inflicted during military raids over recent years. “There’s a cumulative effect impacting water network, sewage, and electricity and in some of the camps you have accumulation of that over months,” says Friedrich. “Secondly, the destructions of private houses, and the cumulative effect is that these three camps have perhaps become uninhabitable. That is very worrying”.
Concerns about rebuilding capacity are heightened by the anticipated steep costs, especially given the Palestinian Authority’s dire financial situation and international organizations prioritizing Gaza’s reconstruction. Further difficulties arise from Israel severing ties with UNRWA – the agency responsible for services in the camps – and barring entry to its foreign workers.
“In some camps, militants place IEDs in sewers, the IDF destroys them,” Friedrich says. “The sewers is the most important thing to fix quickly because of the public health implications. At some places we replaced the sewers I don’t know how many times just so there’s no disease starting at the end of an operation. We don’t know yet what is the level of the destruction, but clearly it will cost lots of money to rehabilitate.”
The military said in response to a request for comment that the army “does not destroy buildings unnecessarily” and that it is operating in camps in the northern West Bank “to thwart terrorism in a complex security environment, where terrorists embed their infrastructure among civilian populations and inside civilian structures.” The army added that since several camps and villages in the area have become “bases for deadly terrorism,” hosting militants trained for attacks, the military is compelled to conduct operations in them.
The military added that certain operations inherently require modifications within the camps to ensure freedom of movement, particularly due to past incidents where planted explosives resulted in casualties among soldiers. Additionally, the army said it conducts targeted demolitions of structures identified as terror assets, including “homes of terrorists responsible for fatal attacks within Israel and the surrounding region.”
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