Since January last year, when the Israeli military launched a campaign it calls “Iron Wall,” large parts of the occupied West Bank’s refugee camps have been transformed into front lines. Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams have seen systematic house demolition and infrastructure clearance that human rights groups say has produced the largest displacement in the territory since 1967. More than 40,000 Palestinians from those camps are now homeless, forced into makeshift shelter, cramped rented flats or abandoned vehicles.
In Nur Shams the landscape of daily life has become the roar of excavators and the dust of collapsing homes. Israeli forces say they have uncovered armed activity and explosives inside the camps; residents say the raids and demolitions have left already fragile dwellings reduced to rubble. Seventy-one-year-old Abdel Salam Oud now sleeps in a stripped-down bread van; floodwater recently soaked his bedding and left him shivering through the night. His story is one among many that render the abstract language of “security operations” into visible human distress.
Large families have been compressed into single apartments. The Halifa clan, once settled across multiple properties inside a camp, now squeezes forty-five relatives into two flats. They fled after an Israeli order to evacuate and were told they would be able to return in weeks. Eleven months later their neighbourhood remains inaccessible and their houses uninhabitable. For them this displacement is the second in a family history that began with the 1948 exodus from their ancestral home near Haifa.
That history alters how a familiar political demand has been reframed. For decades “the right of return” has been invoked as a principle and a political touchstone for Palestinians seeking to reclaim ancestral land. For many camp residents today the demand has been reduced to a far more immediate and modest plea: not to return to Haifa but to return to the makeshift homes their families have occupied for generations inside the camps.
Satellite analysis compiled by rights investigators shows the scale of destruction: by the end of 2025 at least 850 buildings in Nur Shams, Jenin and Tulkarm had been demolished. The physical erasure of housing stock and infrastructure in dense refugee settlements creates not just short-term homelessness but the conditions for longer-term dispossession, as shelters, schools and livelihoods disappear amid military operations.
The humanitarian consequences are immediate and acute. Displaced families face overcrowding, higher rents, loss of income, interrupted education and deteriorating health conditions as winter storms expose people sheltering in vehicles and temporary rooms to cold and damp. Local coping mechanisms — kin networks and communal support — are strained when the camp itself is the thing under attack.
The political and legal stakes are substantial. Mass, repeated displacement in occupied territory invites scrutiny under international humanitarian law and raises questions about proportionality and collective punishment, even as Israeli authorities frame their actions as counter‑insurgency measures. If the demolitions and denials of access become permanent, the result will be a de facto redrawing of who lives where across parts of the West Bank — with implications for demographics, municipal control and any future political settlement.
Strategically, the current pattern deepens grievances that have fuelled cycles of violence for decades. When the possibility of returning even to a refugee camp is closed off, the grievance shifts from the generational claim to ancestral land to a more immediate sense of acute injustice and dispossession. That shift complicates diplomatic efforts to stabilise the West Bank and reduces the space for moderate political actors on both sides.
International agencies and rights groups face limited capacity to reverse the trend while operations continue. Reconstruction and returns require guarantees of safety and access that are currently absent for many displaced families. The coming months will test whether temporary displacement hardens into permanent demographic change, and whether external diplomats or courts can translate concern into effective remedies for tens of thousands now living without secure shelter.