Since January 2025, Israel's Operation Iron Wall has emptied three refugee camps in the northern occupied West Bank — Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams — displacing 33,362 Palestinians. The military operation destroyed or damaged 52 percent of structures in Jenin, 48 percent in Nur Shams, and 36 percent in Tulkarem by October 2025. The displaced have scattered into rented apartments, relatives' homes, schools, mosques, and tin shacks. The camps they left behind have been rendered functionally uninhabitable. The destruction is not incidental to a military objective — it is the objective. In Tulkarem alone, more than 2,000 housing units were completely destroyed, and 90 percent of remaining homes sustained partial damage. Water and electricity networks were severed. Some demolished areas were converted into roads, and reconstruction bans were imposed. Faisal Salameh of the Tulkarem Camp Popular Committee described an environment engineered to drive residents away. On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the government to present a timeline for the return of displaced residents, setting a November 23 deadline. The response from the executive was immediate and unambiguous. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich rejected the ruling outright, framing any return as enabling "terror infrastructure." Defence Minister Israel Katz asserted that the military presence was a security decision beyond judicial reach. This is not a novel dynamic. Analyst Mohamad Halaseh noted that the Israeli right wing is not merely restructuring the judiciary but actively undermining its legitimacy. He cited the government's prior noncompliance with court orders on Palestinian prisoner visitations as precedent. The pattern is clear: when court rulings conflict with the political leadership's position, the executive simply ignores them. The judiciary lacks enforcement mechanisms against a government willing to absorb the reputational cost of defiance. The human toll is granular and documented. UNRWA reports 102 Palestinians killed during the operation, including 21 children — 46 percent of all West Bank killings in the period. Fuad Abu Salam, 42, now watches his partially demolished and burned four-apartment building from a 100-square-metre rental. His extended family of over 40 was scattered. Mohamad Ararawi, 18, found his Jenin home replaced by a road. His family of eight sheltered in an unfinished apartment, enduring extreme temperatures. The Nur Shams camp tells the same story at scale: approximately 400 homes of three to four stories destroyed, 100 more burned, and 10,900 residents still displaced. Surviving structures suffer severe damage to doors, windows, and interiors; collapsed buildings have damaged adjacent homes. Even if a return were permitted tomorrow, the infrastructure to sustain a population does not exist. What is unfolding is the conversion of temporary military operation into permanent demographic engineering. The displaced want to return — every testimony in this report says so unequivocally. But the political conditions for return do not exist when the ministers who control the military openly defy the court that ordered the return timeline. The November 23 deadline will test whether Israel's judiciary retains any coercive authority over its own executive, or whether the separation of powers has become purely decorative.
