Understanding Israel’s campaign to destroy Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank
Israeli forces carry out a military raid in the Askar refugee camp, east of the West Bank city of Nablus, on 6 August 2026
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 11 August 2026:
The Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank are at the center of the news again after the Israeli army launched a new, prolonged raid on the Qalandia refugee camp, which is located north of Jerusalem, and just outside of Ramallah. Late on Tuesday night, Israeli forces entered Qalandia after sealing it off and proceeded to arrest dozens of Palestinians and conduct field interrogations, while distributing leaflets threatening Palestinians with arrest if they take any action against Israeli forces.
In an earlier incursion at Qalandia this May, Israeli soldiers told residents to “pack your things and go to a European country,” and repeatedly invoked the name “Jenin” as they moved through the camp. Residents understood the reference to Jenin as a direct threat, given the annihilation of the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.
The current raid on Qalandia came days after Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, announced that he had instructed the army to occupy “another” refugee camp in the West Bank in a repeat of Israel’s occupation of three refugee camps in the northern West Bank in early 2025. At the time, the Israeli army displaced the entire population of Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps in Tulkarem, and Jenin refugee camp in Jenin, representing at least 40,000 people. They were never allowed to return to their homes, and they still remain displaced to this day, many of them continuing to endure a humanitarian crisis.
During Israel’s destruction of the camps, Israeli forces razed large portions of the residents’ homes, carving wide dirt roads into the heart of the built environment to supposedly create “safe roads” for Israeli forces to operate. In reality, it is not only part of Israel’s attempts to “re-engineer” the architecture of the camps, but to eliminate them as camps entirely, instead converting them into urban extensions of their neighboring cities and doing away with what they represent.
Since 2021, Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps were hubs of local armed resistance groups, but a harsh Israeli crackdown on the groups culminated in the camps’ wholesale depopulation.