For 119 consecutive days, Israel has been carrying out a vicious, large-scale military assault on the northern West Bank governorates, including Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall”. The military assault involves the use of extensive deployment of hundreds of Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF), including snipers, the recourse to airstrikes through reconnaissance drones and Apache helicopters, and an array of military vehicles, including D9 and D10 bulldozers, tanks and Eitan armoured personnel carriers. Between 21 January and 16 May 2025, the IOF have besieged refugee camps, killing 91 Palestinians, including 13 children and three women, extensively destroying infrastructure and demolishing and destroying homes, in the governorates of Jenin, Tulkarem, Tubas and Nablus. In Jenin alone, the IOF killed 40 Palestinians, including seven children and one woman, and destroyed at least 430 structures and houses, shops and businesses according to preliminary reports on file at Al-Haq.
In Jenin, during the first hours of the brutal attack, which began on 21 January 2025, the IOF besieged the Jenin refugee camp by encircling and blocking off all entrances and exits, deploying heavy military force and occupying buildings in its vicinity by snipers, and declaring it a closed military zone. On 1 March 2025, the IOF closed off all entrances to the camp with earth mounds between 1.5 to 2 meters high. The IOF created a so-called ‘safe passage’ towards the western entrance of the camp, near Al-Awda roundabout, where soldiers were deployed. During the attack, the IOF forcibly displaced residents under direct threat of death and various other means. Amidst the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and airstrikes, camp residents were forced to leave, while those who refused to leave were threatened to be killed.
On the second day of the attack, and for four days, the IOF ordered camp residents, through loudspeakers installed on drones hovering over the camp, to vacate their houses and leave the camp through the ‘safe passage’. At the ‘safe passage’, people were searched and divided into groups of five, then taken in front of a family home and searched. Some were let go, while others were arrested, forced to strip out of their clothes and wear white clothing, hands tied and eyes blindfolded, then transferred via military vehicles to Al-Jalamah checkpoint, where they were subjected to further interrogation. About 16,600 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in the Jenin refugee camp alone, with much of their houses and infrastructure destroyed.
On the 77th annual commemoration of the Nakba, Al-Haq highlights Israel’s attacks on Palestinian refugee camps, as part of the broader structural violence perpetrated by Israel’s Zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime in a continuous effort to erase the presence of the Palestinian people. The increasing colonial violence and ongoing genocide, and the widespread forced displacement of Palestinians all constitute part of the ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people.
The Displacement of Huda Bani Gharra
On 21 January 2025, Huda Bani Gharra, a middle-aged woman and resident of Jenin refugee camp, was present in the Ibn Sina Hospital when the IOF raided Jenin refugee camp. Huda was accompanying her sick aunt, hoping that the IOF would leave the camp by night and that they would be able to return home. As the aggressive military assault persisted, Huda and her aunt were left stranded without shelter or their belongings, including her aunt’s medication. They stayed in the hospital for three nights, sleeping in the cold emergency department, feeding on what little food was left in the hospital’s cafeteria. They then decided to leave to stay at Huda’s workplace in Jenin city, a workshop unfit for habitation. In her testimony to Al-Haq, Huda recalled:
“We, along with 12 of my family members [including several children and sick aunt], stayed in the workshop for 20 days. We suffered from the cold, there weren’t enough blankets and mattresses, or healthy food. My sick aunt couldn’t eat canned food, so we struggled to provide her with food fit for her health condition. We also struggled to provide her medication. Water was cut off, so we didn’t receive any water and had to find it elsewhere for our daily use. We needed water to care for our children as well. Then, as the IOF were continuously positioned in front of the workshop, firing daily sound bombs that frightened the children, we moved further inside the association building next to the workshop.”
On 26 February 2025, Huda risked her life and decided to enter the camp and check up on her home to gather a few basic necessities for her family, including her aunt’s medication. She told Al-Haq:
“I risked my life to reach the camp yesterday [after being displaced]. I saw our home and collected a few of our belongings. When people describe how the camp has been destroyed, it’s hard to explain in words what is happening on the ground in the camp. The reality is more difficult, more difficult than one can imagine. I saw destroyed homes, burned homes, rocks, bulldozed infrastructure. I don’t know what to say, it’s very difficult, I don’t know how to express [in words]. It’s hard to go back to the camp. It’s hard to see the house that you’ve worked all your life to build, destroyed before your eyes. It’s hard to think of how we used to walk the clean, proper streets in the camp safely. All of this is gone, all of this has been destroyed. The camp’s features are no longer recognisable. I couldn’t reach or recognise my own home. When I went to get some of our belongings, I was shocked, I did not know what to take. I went to get the basics, I managed to get my aunt’s medication, children’s medication, and clothing. It is very difficult to describe the horrors and severity of the situation… We have lost the place of our birth, the place that holds our memories, our neighbours and families, and our martyred loved ones, and are now displaced. Our great loss is losing the beautiful memories of seeing our neighbours, the elderly, in the morning on our way to work, drinking coffee, talking and laughing, the children playing safely outside till late in the evening. This is too difficult to bear.”
Huda confirmed that hope lies in the steadfastness and resilience of the Palestinian people. “Houses are replaceable, but not humans. The younger generation will rebuild all that has been destroyed.”
General Context
The ongoing military attack –– the longest and most destructive in the occupied West Bank since the second Intifada –– is directly targeting Palestinian refugee camps across the West Bank whose residents have been predominantly refugees since 1948, in acts amounting to a continuing Nakba.
Five refugee camps have come under attack, whose residents have been forcibly displaced and buildings demolished or destroyed, including in Jenin, Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Al-Far’a, and Ein Beit al-Mai refugee camps –– Jenin and Tulkarem camps have been completely evacuated. Tens of thousands of residents, estimated at over 42,000 Palestinians, from Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams, and Al-Far’a refugee camps, in addition to residents surrounding the camps, have been displaced. While residents of Al-Far’a camp were allowed to return, residents from Jenin and Tulkarem camps remain denied their right to return, in confirmation of Israel’s Defence Minister’s, Israel Katz, declared intention to keep IOF troops for an “extended stay” in parts of the occupied West Bank and to “not allow the return of residents”.
While the ongoing military attack has resulted in a large number of forcibly displaced Palestinians in recent days, IOF military attacks in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of 2023 have also resulted in thousands of families being forcibly displaced from Jenin refugee camp. The systematic targeting of refugee camps in the West Bank raises an urgent question: Why, after 77 years, do refugee camps continue to exist, and refugees continue to be denied their right of return, and subjected to violence and repeated waves of forced displacement, some for the second or third time? Palestinian refugee camps stand as unyielding symbols of the right of return, preserving Palestinian identity and resilience in the face of the decades-long ongoing Nakba. Attacking refugee camps is an attack on Palestinian refugeehood and on the inalienable right to return.
Legal Analysis
Israel’s targeting of refugee camps is being carried out in furtherance of its settler colonial occupation of the Palestinian territory (OPT), has been found by the International Court of Justice to breach peremptory norms of international law and is therefore unlawful. Israel is demographically re-engineering and permanently altering the character of the OPT, in violation of the law of occupation, and in continuing breach of jus cogens norms of international law, prohibiting the acquisition of territory through use of force, and denial of self-determination. In addition to the commission of war crimes, the forcible displacement of Palestinians as carried out in such a systematic and widespread manner against the civilian population amounts to the crime against humanity of forcible transfer of population, and when carried out with intent to destroy the Palestinian group, amounts to genocide, punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The Nakba has not ended; it is ongoing, and its violence is increasing in intensity. Israel’s acceleration of its colonial genocidal violence against the Palestinian people highlights the direct and grave consequences of the longstanding, unchecked impunity fortified by the international community. The international community’s failure to uphold and ensure the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and right to return further contravenes their erga omnes obligations as Third States, to bring the illegal situation to an end.