More than 3,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in Hebron over four days as the Israeli military escalates an operation that analysts and human rights experts describe as a systematic effort to make displacement permanent. Governor Khaled Dudin reported 488 families — 3,171 people — displaced across the governorate, with Mayor Yousef al-Jabari confirming 3,043 expelled from Hebron city alone. The majority are women, children, and elderly. At least 71 people have been detained. The operation follows the explicit application of what Israeli officials call the "Jenin camp model" — a template first deployed in early 2025 across the Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarem refugee camps, which killed at least 102 people, displaced over 33,000, and destroyed more than half of residential buildings. Defence Minister Israel Katz previously described the Jenin tactics as "the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza," where more than 74,000 have been killed. UNRWA described the Jenin camp as "nearly uninhabitable" afterward. A UN OHCHR report warned the actions "appear to amount to collective punishment and raise concerns of ethnic cleansing." The Hebron operation operates on three simultaneous axes: physical demolition, military conversion of civilian homes, and infrastructure destruction. Israeli soldiers have converted dozens of Palestinian homes into military barracks and field interrogation centres. Roads, factories, and residential buildings have been demolished. Water wells have been targeted — a move analysts describe as aimed at undermining the basic conditions for habitation. Professor Noman Amr of al-Quds Open University categorized the forced evacuations into three types: evacuation for demolition, evacuation for collective punishment, and evacuation for military use. Settler violence operates as a parallel enforcement mechanism. Amr described a settler militia of more than 150,000 people armed with modern automatic weapons and four-wheel-drive vehicles, sometimes wearing Israeli army uniforms. The army closes areas, empties and demolishes homes, and closes roads; settlers then attack remaining residents, released prisoners, and commercial interests. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 220 barriers erected across Hebron, severing Palestinian communities from their lands while maintaining connectivity for illegal settlements. The timing is politically instrumental. Israel's parliamentary election falls on Tuesday, and the military announced a full closure of West Bank crossings into and out of the territory on election day. The army separately barred Palestinian workers from entering most areas of the West Bank through Monday. Mayor al-Jabari accused Netanyahu and his hard-right government of exploiting the operation to secure settler votes. Amr echoed this: "The Palestinian pays this price as electoral propaganda for the right wing." The strategic logic, as articulated by analysts on the ground, is territorial consolidation. Amr summarized the goal in one sentence: "more land, fewer Arabs." Displaced residents reported soldiers telling them, "You will return to your homes on Judgement Day." The UN report on Jenin documented Israeli officers telling displaced Palestinians there would be no more refugee camps and that they should "all go to Jordan." The network of new outposts documented by the CRRC is designed to expand control over spaces separating settlements and to besiege Palestinian expansions. What makes the Hebron operation structurally significant is its explicit formalization. Netanyahu pledged an operation "unseen" since the 1967 war, but the operational template is now named, documented, and replicable: the Jenin model. Each deployment refines the same sequence — lockdown, forced evacuation, demolition, infrastructure destruction, settler expansion — and each application makes the next politically easier. The two soldiers killed near Hebron on Friday provided the trigger; the apparatus was already built.
