More than 33,000 Palestinians forcibly removed from the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps in early 2025 now face what UN officials describe as the largest single episode of forced displacement in the West Bank since Israel's occupation began in 1967. Twenty months into what was framed as a temporary security operation, closed military zone orders are renewed every two months with no indication residents will be allowed to return. The physical infrastructure of return is being erased: UN satellite imagery shows 20 percent of all buildings across the three camps destroyed, another 28 percent damaged, and a road now built through the razed Tulkarem camp. The human cost is granular and compounding. Hakim Mar'i, unable to work due to a severe leg injury worsened when Israeli soldiers beat him during the forced evacuation, lies in a blacked-out apartment around the corner from the rubble of his family's four-storey home — built floor by floor after their original displacement from al-Khudayra (Hadera) in 1948. He owes local shops for food bought on credit. His children eat at neighbours' houses some nights. He has considered suicide multiple times. His mother Salwa describes watching the home demolished to make way for a military road through the emptied camp. Khadija Zbeidat, a widow from the camp's Haret al-Nadi section, shares a single spartan room with nine family members — nearly all children — with a kitchen barely large enough for one person. Her daughter-in-law risked being shot to retrieve a doll from the ruins that Khadija's granddaughter would not stop crying about. The communal rituals that held the camp together — stuffed grape leaves and maamoul cookies made neighbourhood-wide for Eid — are gone. "Nothing. No cookies," Khadija said. "Nobody even had it in them to do anything any more. Everyone went their own way — scattered." The economic architecture of displacement is stark. UNRWA's Roland Friedrich reports 85 percent of the displaced have no regular income after losing jobs when the camps were emptied. More than 80 percent are renting for the first time, an unfamiliar expense for families who never paid housing or utility costs inside the camps. Displaced families cluster either in the poorest areas nearest the camps or on cheap outskirts, tethered to whatever UNRWA health and school services still function. But even grocery shopping requires Khadija, who has no car, to travel two kilometres. The informal safety net that absorbed initial shock — landlords waiving rent, shopkeepers extending credit, relatives doubling up — is fraying as the emergency stretches toward two years. Hakim's family has been forced to move four times since January 2025. Friedrich describes UNRWA shifting to a "targeted approach" as funds dwindle, leaving thousands without support. The agency has observed rising gender-based violence linked to economic strain and growing depression and anxiety among displaced children. "We're already at the brink now," Friedrich said. The Israeli military frames the operations as rooting out fighters for "operational security." Friedrich offers a different reading: the aim may be to "change the geographical expression of the Palestinian refugee issue" — a bureaucratic phrase for eliminating the physical and institutional markers of refugee status that have persisted since 1948. Unlike after the second Intifada, when the Jenin camp was rebuilt, displaced families and UNRWA staff see no return plan this time. The camps that were supposed to be temporary in 1948 are now being made permanently uninhabitable. What remains is a population in administrative limbo: unable to return, unable to afford where they are, watched by drones at night, subject to military raids that follow them to wherever they flee. The displacement is not a single event but a ratchet — each turn removing another layer of stability, each month making reversal less plausible. The question is not whether this constitutes forced displacement; the UN has already said it does. The question is whether anyone with leverage intends to reverse it.
