State of Siege: Israel is conducting its largest mass expulsion campaign in the West Bank since 1967
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in a violent Israeli rampage that at times has been aided by the Palestinian Authority
NABLUS & JENIN, occupied West Bank—Israeli military forces killed 34-year-old Tariq Qassas with a bullet to the chest on February 25 while he was on his way home from work at a bakery two kilometers away in the Old City of Nablus. Qassas, a father to a five-year-old with another child on the way, was the eleventh Palestinian to be killed in Nablus—a bustling city in the north of the occupied West Bank—since January.
“My brother called me while at work and told me to be careful when heading home, to make sure that the army is gone,” Loay Qassas told Drop Site News. The Israeli army had been conducting an operation near the western cemetery in the city. “In the end, it was him that was killed while heading home from work.”
Medics arrived to transport his body to Rafidia hospital to be prepared for burial. En route, Israeli forces stopped the ambulance and, at gunpoint, ordered paramedics to uncover his face so the soldiers could scan it using facial recognition technology. “Even in death, they want to come and mark their kill,” Loay said, before carrying his brother’s casket to its final resting place.
Qassas’s killing is part of a sweeping Israeli military assault, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” that has largely emptied four refugee camps in the northern West Bank—Jenin, Tulkarem, Faraa, and Nur Shams—forcing over 40,000 Palestinians to flee their homes in the largest forced displacement in the territory since the 1967 war. Israeli troops have bulldozed roads and destroyed homes, buildings, water and electricity lines, and other civilian infrastructure. On February 23, Israel’s Defense Minister said Israeli troops would remain in some of the refugee camps for the coming year and that displaced residents would not be allowed to return.
Israel launched Operation Iron Wall on January 21, two days after the Gaza “ceasefire” went into effect. More than 60 Palestinians, including 11 children, have been killed by Israeli forces and state-backed settlers in the West Bank since then. With the Gaza ceasefire deal in peril as a result of Netanyahu’s sabotage and Israel—even further emboldened by the re-election of Donald Trump—on an aggressive and violent rampage in the region, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank face one of the most dire realities imposed on them by Israel in decades.
For residents, this means a relentless escalation of daily terror and the brutal treatment of their dead. Two days after Qassas’s funeral, a 25 year-old named Mahmoud Sanaqra was killed in an armed confrontation with Israeli troops after they conducted a dawn raid on his home in the Balata refugee camp east of Nablus.
Sanaqra’s family was unable to lay him to rest because the Israeli army took his body and still refuses to return it. Israel’s practice of keeping Palestinian bodies to use as bargaining chips, or simply as a way to punish the bereaved, is decades old and has been decried by human rights organizations as cruel and inhumane treatment of grieving families. It is also an act of collective punishment against Palestinians. Israel is currently holding hundreds of bodies, many in refrigerators or “cemeteries of numbers,” where they are buried in secret, often in closed military zones and identified solely by numbers.
The Emptying of the Jenin Camp
Over the past two weeks, roads outside Jenin have been destroyed in an obliteration campaign, cafes and commercial infrastructure bulldozed, and the main streets rendered nearly impassable. While buildings inside the camp have been completely destroyed, civilian homes and buildings outside the camp have been converted into military positions, where Israeli soldiers stationed snipers and used them as shelters. The operation is now expanding beyond the refugee camp and penetrating toward the city, with the Israeli army declaring the entire district of Jenin a closed military zone.
“My home was burned to the ground in the last invasion,” Adel Al-Bisher, 65, from Jenin refugee camp told Drop Site, referring to Operation Summer Camps, which took place six months ago. In that military operation, 20 Palestinians were killed and dozens of homes were either destroyed by bulldozers, anti-tank grenades, or simply burned to the ground.
In December, Palestinian security forces raided Jenin as part of a six-week long campaign, dubbed “Operation Protect Home,” in which more than a dozen Palestinians, including two children, were killed. During the offensive, resistance fighters from armed Palestinian groups, including the Jenin Brigade, the Tulkarem Brigade, and the Lions’ Den, were arrested en masse in what was one of the longest and most lethal assaults by Palestinian security forces in the West Bank since they began operating in 1995.
The presence of these resistance groups in the refugee camps and in the Old City of Nablus prevented the Israeli army from raiding these areas unimpeded. (Jenin is also a key area that both Israeli energy companies and the Palestinian Authority, or PA, were exploring as a site to build factories and corporations in 2021, but they were thwarted by the resistance.)
Israel’s own offensive—Operation Iron Wall—began just hours after the PA officially declared the end of theirs. While PA spokespeople have publicly condemned the offensive, Drop Site confirmed that senior PA security officials were present in Jenin when the Israeli military invaded in January.
Following Operation Summer Camps, hundreds of families from the Jenin camp were displaced and forced to search for shelter. Now, many of them find themselves under attack yet again. At this moment in the city of Jenin, not only are Merkava tanks deployed inside the city, but also Israeli military vehicles, including D-9 and D-10 Caterpillar bulldozers, and Eitan armored vehicles. Undercover Israeli special operations units and armored personnel carriers now roam the city freely, not even stones are thrown at them. At the same time, the West Bank is experiencing unprecedented rates of Israeli airstrikes—exceeding even those unleashed during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the largest Israeli military offensive of the Second Intifada.
The Al-Bisher family is staying in an apartment a few hundred meters away from the eastern entrance of the camp. The building behind them has been commandeered by Israeli forces as a makeshift military base with bulldozers and armored personnel carriers stationed 24/7.
“They destroyed more than 12 homes belonging to our family, including the homes of my brothers and cousins. All of them are gone, but now even in this apartment we are not comfortable, but where do we go?” Al-Bisher asked.
Some of the windows of the building are broken, with the glass still scattered in the parking lot while the walls of the building are riddled with bullet holes. “You see that window up there,” Al-Bisher said. “The bullet went through the window, across the bedroom, and out the other window.”
The Israeli soldiers stationed just behind the building preside over an atmosphere of terror. Al-Bisher warned against taking any pictures from the vantage point of their building. “Just two days ago one of the residents was caught filming from his balcony and the soldiers raided the building, grabbed him, and began beating him brutally,” he said.
Thousands of other displaced families are now stranded between the homes of relatives in neighboring villages or in nearby schools turned into shelters. Others are camping in tents on the city’s outskirts because they have nowhere else to go.
A Perilous Return to Salvage Belongings
“Please don’t take pictures of our faces,” a woman said outside Jenin public hospital next to Jenin refugee camp on February 26. She requested anonymity not only out of fear for her safety, but because of the conditions imposed on them. “We’ve never been filmed before, and I don’t want us filmed in these humiliating conditions,” she added, holding back tears.
Forcibly displaced to a neighboring village, she had made the perilous decision to return to her destroyed home on the edges of the camp in an effort to salvage some belongings.
Holding plastic bags containing the few items she, her 10-year-old son, and 18-year-old daughter were able to collect, she was frantic.
“I came to get this small heater, some trays, and cooking utensils because Ramadan is here and we need to cook,” she said. Pointing at the pile of her kitchen items on the dirt ground, she wondered how they would transport them. “Look at my daughter, she has her final exams and hasn’t been able to study so she came to grab her laptop, and some clothes,” she said, her voice quivering.
“I want to be home,” the woman said. “I just want to be home. For the last year there has been no room to breathe. It has been one operation after the next.” She described the recent Israeli military attacks and those of the Palestinian Authority, conducted under the auspices of targeting armed resistance fighters in the West Bank. “Now this,” she said. “I can’t breathe, I want to breathe.”
Later that day, a young man stood on a bulldozed street between the Jenin hospital and the camp waiting for his mother and father to arrive. Like many others, they tried to sneak into their home to gather some belongings after a month of being displaced with nothing but the clothes they were wearing.
“The army had them detained for two hours, but they should have been let go by now,” the man said, clutching his phone, the only remaining link he had to his parents. He also spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.
“I can’t go and help them. They’ll shoot immediately at all of us because I’m a young man,” he said. With the camp ordered emptied, Israeli snipers stationed on the outskirts often shoot at will.
The snipers have also fired at journalists, medics tending to the chronically ill or injured, and the elderly who have tried to sneak in to gather some belongings.
Unlike Gaza, the overwhelming majority, or 96% of the over 1,200 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 2022, have been boys and men. As a result, the dangerous task of trying to slip back into the camp to gather belongings has been left to the elderly, children, and women in the hope that the army will not target them.
At one point, three children—13 year-old Ward, 12 year-old Faisal, and 13 year-old Mohammad—rallied each other to build up the courage to try and return to retrieve an iPad.
The kids entered the edges of the camp, moving between the destroyed alleyways where a few other families had managed to reach earlier that day. They walked with their hands raised as they made their way over the rubble and mud. As soon as they grabbed the iPad they hurried back out, walking as quickly as they could without actually running.
Only a few residents willing to brave the dangers to collect their belongings have seen the level of destruction inside the camp firsthand.
Sixty-five year-old Kareemeh, was one of the few elderly residents that took that risk to check on her home. She pushed through the mud and over a mountain of rubble. She said she was planning to grab a few things–documents and IDs, as well as some clothes for her mother, who was struggling in the winter cold.
The moment Kareemeh walked into what remained of her home in the eastern part of the camp, she stood petrified. The windows had all been shattered—likely due to the airstrikes and demolitions, which left nearby buildings completely destroyed—and glass was all over the floor. The furniture was ransacked, the kitchen wrecked, and clothes had been pulled from the closet and tossed across the floor.
With only minutes to finish the task and leave the camp, Kareemeh began collecting canned foods and putting them in plastic bags. But as she sifted through the debris, she quickly forgot what she was doing and became fixated on the carpets.
“Come here, you. Help me pull the carpets away from the windows so the rain doesn’t ruin them,” she told me. Distraught, she pulled at the carpets, glass cutting through her hands. It took a while to calm her and help her focus on gathering necessities so we could leave the camp quickly as the looming threat from Israeli snipers was growing.
In the end, she took a few papers, undershirts and headscarves, and managed to grab cans of beans and sardines. Her hand bleeding, she carried what she could. “Just let me lock my house door,” she said as she left—a final gesture to retain some semblance of a home where she hoped one day to return.
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More disgusting behavior by the IOF .. Behaving like thugs
Shame on Netanyahu and the US government for allowing this to continue happening.