Rain hammered Nur Shams camp in Tulkarem as loudspeakers crackled to life: “Get out of here!” the voice ordered.
Hajjar Sarham stood frozen in her doorway, house slippers sinking into the mud as neighbours poured from their homes in confusion and panic. She was searching for her 11-year-old, mentally ill boy, who refused to leave when the warning came.
“No,” he said.
Israeli soldiers found him and tore off his clothes during the search. While Hajjar watched, a gun was pressed to her head. There was no time to gather belongings — just run.
Around her, families stumbled forward with plastic bags, rolled-up mattresses, and sleeping babies. The growl of bulldozers crept closer.
At a crossroads, chaos reigned. Cars jammed with families edged forward, unsure where to go. A soldier’s arm signalled them down an unknown road.
Hajjar was pushed into a car already packed with strangers. Then the sky split open: drone strikes hit the camp.
News spread that Hajjar was presumed dead. She had bled from late afternoon until the next morning, with no ambulance in sight.
“Where are my children?” she cried, searching for her three boys and a girl, all missing.
Some families found their sons by a finger, a leg. The faces were gone. Later, as if the destruction wasn’t enough, Israeli fire rained down again before an ambulance could reach them.
The West Bank’s silent war
Since October 7, 2023, violence in the West Bank has escalated to unprecedented levels. Israeli forces have carried out multiple drone strikes on the Nur Shams refugee camp alone, killing dozens of civilians and fighters.
Across the region, the military has intensified operations involving tanks, airstrikes and home demolitions. Human rights groups, including the Israeli non-profit B’tselem, describe the escalation as the “Gazafication” of the West Bank — military tactics once used primarily in Gaza now deployed routinely in the occupied territory.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), about 900 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023. And since the launch of Israel’s “Operation Iron Wall” on January 21, 2025, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported that over 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from refugee camps.
This is the largest wave of displacement in the West Bank since 1967 and the longest military operation in the last 20 years.
Hajjar has spent the past five months in a school converted into a shelter near Tulkarem. She shares the cramped, damp space with her sister, her three boys, her daughter, and seven other families. There’s no gas or electricity. Mould creeps along the walls. Her son, she says, is spiralling without access to psychiatric medication.
“Enough is enough. You took what you wanted. You destroyed us. You scattered us. You starved us. Enough,” she said. “No one is paying attention to us. No one cares. There is no life.”
Tulkarem, once a calm place where people rebuilt after the Nakba, worked, and moved freely, is now unrecognisable.
According to UNRWA, at least 80 houses have been completely demolished in the Nur Shams camp, impacting some 300 families.
“Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps are essentially empty since February… People have been forced to leave by threat of violence or because they were afraid,” said Roland Friedrich, director of UNRWA affairs in the West Bank.
Home demolitions and displacement
These demolitions accompany intensified military raids and the seizure of Palestinian-owned property.
“It’s very similar to what we have seen in the Gaza Strip, but on a smaller scale,” said Lubnah Shomali, advocacy manager at BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights.
Israeli forces have expanded operations in towns such as Jenin, Hebron and Nablus, conducting night raids, expanding checkpoints and closing roads for days.
These closures often block access to medical care. In one case, a patient from Bethlehem had to walk over three hours to receive treatment, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
The 1995 Oslo II peace accord divided the West Bank into three areas: A (under Palestinian Authority control), B (joint control), and C (under full Israeli control). But in practice, Israel maintains overriding military power in all zones. The result is fragmented communities and an ever-tightening system of control, characterised by Israeli military or police checkpoints that control and restrict Palestinian movement in and around the occupied West Bank.
“It not only fragments people in terms of access to land and to space, but also access to each other; so it also erodes the Palestinian identity and social cohesion and family relations,” Lubnah said.
According to OCHA, between January and mid-April 2025, Israeli authorities demolished 456 structures in Area C, displacing 445 people. Demolitions and displacements more than doubled compared to the same period in 2024.
Due to ongoing military activity, residents who have left the combat zones are currently not permitted to return, except for specific, coordinated entries to retrieve their belongings. In early May, local broadcasts documented Israeli soldiers firing at residents trying to retrieve belongings from the camp.
The Israeli Defence Forces wrote in a statement via WhatsApp that these operations were conducted “as part of the counterterrorism campaign in northern Samaria, and to prevent terrorists from returning to the area and reestablishing themselves there.”
Roland called the displacement “forcible,” a term that under international law constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and may meet the threshold of a war crime under Article 49.
“These demolitions have to stop. They have no military necessity,” he said.
Inside the prisons: A parallel repression
This same system extends beyond checkpoints and demolished homes. Thousands of Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, many without charge or trial.
Mohammad Al Milh, a recently released prisoner from Ramallah, spent 29 years in Israeli jails as a political prisoner and said the violence inside prison mirrors what is unfolding across the West Bank.
Following the October 7 attack, he said he and others were locked in their cells 24 hours a day for nearly six months, denied access to books, radios and fresh air.
“I was personally assaulted, and there was no reason. They [the Israeli guards] stormed the room, beat us and left,” he said.
“What’s happening in prison is happening across all of Palestine’s geography. The settler-colonial project doesn’t just aim to displace people from their land — it targets the person themselves, either through forced transfer, imprisonment or death.”
The classification of Israel as a settler colonial state is contested, but many scholars and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, argue that its policies reflect settler colonialism, pointing to displacement, land seizure and demographic control as key features.
Organisations like Amnesty International stated that Israeli authorities were complicit in settler attacks. At the same time, B’Tselem documented widespread settler-led expulsions in places like Masafer Yatta and the Jordan Valley, often carried out under military protection.
Mohammad put it bluntly: “The intention is to create a collective conviction among Palestinians that resistance is too costly — and that the only option left is to submit.”
As Hajjar put it: “Here is like Gaza.”
Note: Interviews with Mohammad Al-Milh and Hajjar Sarham have been translated from Arabic. Sam Hassan and Danielle Robertson contributed to the reporting.
Francesca Maria Lorenzini is a reporter at The Jordan Times and a recent graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, where she won the James A. Wechsler Award. Her coverage of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment led to interviews with Al Jazeera, ABC, and TIME, with some of her footage featured in their reports
Follow her on Instagram: @francessmarlo
