JENIN, West Bank — One day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as U.S. president and two days after a tense cease-fire began in Gaza, Israeli forces launched a new war on Palestinians, this time targeting the West Bank.
Men, women, children, young and elderly, some in wheelchairs, others using walkers, were forced to walk out of the Jenin refugee camp on foot because Israeli troops, who had encircled the camp in an effort to root out militants, designated only one route for evacuation, a road which its military bulldozers had previously destroyed.
Israeli officials say the attacks on Jenin city and its adjacent refugee camp, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” are an effort to “defeat terrorism in the area.” The operation is a marked escalation both in scale and intensity from previous attacks. Israeli fighter jets have carried out air strikes, killing at least 25 people, while soldiers blew up an entire neighborhood block. Roads inside and near the camp have been smashed, including those leading to Jenin Government Hospital, the only public health facility in the area, damaging water, sewage and telecommunication networks.
Hassan Abu Sariyeh, a 33-year-old who uses crutches to walk because of a ruptured Achilles tendon, was determined to stay behind in the house he shared with seven other family members, something he had done in previous military operations.
“But then the drones came,” he told me as he slowly made his way out of the camp. “One of them hovered by the window and a voice emanated from it, saying, ‘Leave the camp. We’re about to blow it up’. As soon as the message ended, we heard a loud boom on the roof. Another drone had thrown a sound bomb. That’s when we decided to leave.”
In just four days, the camp was virtually empty of its 20,000 residents.
Since the beginning of the year, Israeli forces have killed 70 Palestinians, including eight children, in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. These include 38 Palestinians killed in the Jenin area alone — using tactics that some find eerily similar to those deployed in Gaza.
“It felt like the same scenes from Gaza were playing out in the West Bank, especially the closure of and siege imposed on hospitals, the prevention of movement to and from the facility, and the attacks on medical staff,” said Dr. Wissam Baker, the head of Jenin Government Hospital.
Baker said that at the beginning of the Israeli operation, the hospital, which serves a population of 370,000, was besieged and all roads leading to it were closed. “Five medics were injured, and staff, patients and visitors were prevented from leaving the hospital. Only after intensive talks with the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations were they allowed to leave,” he said.
Israel’s Gaza-ification of the West Bank, as some like Baker are calling it, involves destroying vital infrastructure, essential services such as water and electricity, raiding homes, preventing medics from reaching injured Palestinians, and attacking large crowds of residents in refugee camps.
The decimation of Gaza has raised questions about whether and at what cost it could ever be rebuilt. This week, Trump seemed to take for granted that it would need to be completely emptied of people and razed to the ground, after which the United States would “take over” the territory to develop it.
That kind of language is hardly reassuring to residents of the West Bank.
“In Gaza, the Israelis have normalized attacking hospitals, razing refugee camps, killing civilians. This is why we see what we are seeing now in the West Bank. It has become commonplace,” said Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former negotiator with the Palestinian delegation carrying out peace talks with Israel.
Many here in the West Bank believe this operation is a way for Israelis, still angry about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, to continue to take revenge on the Palestinian population despite the Gaza cease-fire. They also see it as an attempt to remind Palestinians that they are not in charge, with their movement between cities and towns even within Palestinian areas restricted by as many as 900 military checkpoints. It has been said by others that it is an act of collective punishment targeting refugees and their homes to get rid of the Palestinian “issue” — a sticking point in previous peace negotiations — once and for all.
“Part of this is payback for the cease-fire in Gaza. Inside Israel, there is a sense of defeat —many are questioning why so many Israeli soldiers were killed only for things to go back to the pre-Oct. 7, 2023 status quo,” Buttu said. “They are attacking the West Bank in a show [of] military prowess and for them, Jenin and Gaza are interchangeable — both are known for fighting back.”
The attack was the second large-scale operation against Jenin in as many months. The first had been an unprecedented security operation carried out not by Israeli forces but by the Palestinian Authority, which administers small parts of the West Bank.
The PA has been vying for a role in Gaza ever since its long-dominant Fatah party was defeated by Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections and kicked out of the coastal enclave in a brief civil war in 2007. The attack on Jenin, which began Dec. 5, was not only an attempt to prove its worthiness as a subcontractor for Israel by showing its strength in policing the Palestinian population, but also a testament to how “sacred” — as PA President Mahmoud Abbas once called it — the PA agreement with Israel on security matters is.
The PA crackdown, which lasted until Israeli forces took over, focused on a coalition of armed groups called the Jenin Brigade. The groups are affiliated with traditional Palestinian factions such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and even Fatah, the PA’s ruling party.
It was the Palestinian Authority’s largest security operation against its own people since its establishment in 1994. For nearly two months, the PA besieged the Jenin camp, cutting off water and electricity to most of the inhabitants. At least 11 Palestinians were killed, six of them civilians, including one child.
Together, PA and Israeli operations in Jenin have destroyed between 150 and 180 houses, the vast majority of them during the ongoing raid by Israeli forces. Both forces have also restricted access to the camp, forcing UNRWA, the agency that aids Palestinian refugees, to suspend schools and health services, as well as solid waste collection, worsening an existing sewage crisis.
UN experts have warned that the operations in the West Bank coincide with increased Israeli settlement expansion and armed settler violence against Palestinians. It also comes at a time when UNRWA has been outlawed by Israeli authorities, who argue that the agency perpetuates the refugee issue by recognizing descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees themselves.
In recent days, Israel has expanded its operation beyond Jenin. On January 29, an Israeli airstrike struck a crowded neighborhood in the village of Tamoun in the northern West Bank, killing at least 10 Palestinians in one of the deadliest attacks in the area in months.
Minutes later, Israeli forces raided Qalqilya and its outskirts, escalating the military offensive, ensuring control of all major districts in the northern West Bank. What began as an operation centered in the Jenin refugee camp has now become a sweeping campaign across multiple cities, including Tubas, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jericho.
Similarly in Tulkarem, located southwest of Jenin, Israeli forces damaged infrastructure and disrupted access to water and electricity, leading to the displacement of nearly 1,000 people. In Tulkarem’s refugee camp, Israeli operations have so far displaced over 12,000 of the camps population of nearly 16,000.
According to information gathered by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), “several Palestinian families were already forced to leave their homes by the Israeli military for the duration of the operation, despite the fact they have nowhere to go in the middle of the winter.”
The temporary lull in fighting in Gaza is coming at a high price for Palestinians in the West Bank.
Jenin’s refugee camp, one of 19 scattered across the West Bank, has always been a thorn in Israel’s side as it continues to be a main hub of Palestinian armed resistance. In 2002, as part of the largest military mobilization in the West Bank since the 1967 war, Israeli soldiers invaded the camp, killing at least 54 people, displacing over 4,000 people and destroying more than 35 percent of infrastructure.
Some in the camp still remember those days. Khaled Mansour, 41 — who I met as he, like Abu Sariyeh, was leaving the camp on foot — was a teenager at the time. “In 2002, I went through a similar kind of suffering. The Israeli soldiers made my family leave our home, and they detained me. But even with everything that happened back then, it still feels that this time is worse and more difficult.”
The married father of three is worried he will not have a home to go back to. Over the decades that families have lived in the refugee camps, they have turned them into neighborhoods with homes they built themselves.
“We don’t know if the Israelis will allow us back. We left behind the house my three brothers and I built brick by brick. We left behind the neighborhood we grew up in. We left behind all our memories,” Mansour told me.
He has ample cause for concern; Israeli officials have already said that troops would remain permanently in the camp once the operation was over. “We have declared war on Palestinian terror in the West Bank,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz on a visit to Jenin camp last week. “After the operation is completed, IDF [Israeli army] forces will remain in the camp to ensure that terror does not return.”
Another thing that has made this military operation worse than previous ones is that Israeli forces didn’t just force residents from their homes but ordered them to congregate in an area outside the gate that has deep significance, both symbolically and historically. The location is where more than two years ago a Palestinian-American journalist named Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper.
It is not just the site of her killing but also a place that embodies the camp’s decades-long struggle against Israeli military incursions and displacement. It is marked by a makeshift memorial that has been repeatedly bulldozed and desecrated by Israeli forces. Forcing residents to flee and gather in that location was a stark reminder of the violence the camp’s refugees have experienced since their forced displacement out of their original homes in 1948 — and reinforced the sense that nowhere is safe, not even for journalists.
Abu Sariyeh said the message was delivered from a military quadcopter that hovered outside his home as a disembodied voice instructed him to go to that spot with his family and neighbors.
“When we finally got there, the soldiers separated the women from the men, who, in turn, were photographed. My brother was detained with some other men while others were allowed to leave,” he told me. “We are now headed to my aunt’s house in Wadi Burqin [a town located three miles west of Jenin] with only the clothes on our backs and our identity cards.”
His regret at leaving his house and the camp was immediately evident. “We should have taken pictures of our house. We should have said goodbye to it. Or better still, we should have just stayed.”
The ‘Gaza-ification’ of the West Bank
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