West Bank terror crackdown sees largest displacement of Palestinians since 1967
More than 40,100 have fled their homes amid Operation Iron Wall, according to UNRWA; many say they were told to leave by IDF, which denies issuing evacuation orders
By car and on foot, through muddy olive groves and snipers’ sight lines, tens of thousands of Palestinians in recent weeks have fled Israeli military operations across the northern West Bank — allegedly the largest displacement in the territory since the Six Day War in 1967.
It comes amid an Israel Defense Forces crackdown, dubbed Operation Iron Wall, on local terror groups in the West Bank, launched on January 21, days after a ceasefire agreement was reached in the Gaza Strip, and following recent activity against terror groups by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
The operation began in the terror hotbed of Jenin, which has seen dozens of raids since the Hamas October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel from Gaza, which sparked the ongoing war in that territory, as well as a renewed effort to combat terror groups in the West Bank. Israeli forces have since pushed deeper and more forcefully into several other nearby towns, including Tulkarem, Far’a and Nur Shams.
Humanitarian officials say they haven’t seen such displacement in the West Bank since the Six Day War, when Israel — under threat from Jordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries — captured the West Bank, along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, displacing 300,000 Palestinians.
“This is unprecedented. When you add to this the destruction of infrastructure, we’re reaching a point where the camps are becoming uninhabitable,” said Roland Friedrich, director of West Bank affairs for UNRWA, the UN agency created in 1948 to assist Palestinian refugees, which still takes responsibility for those refugees’ descendants — and classifies them as refugees themselves — many generations later.
“This is our nakba,” said Abed Sabagh, 53, using the Arabic word, meaning “catastrophe,” that Palestinians use to refer to the mass displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Sabagh bundled his seven children into the car on February 9 as sound bombs blared in Nur Shams camp, where he was born to parents who fled that war.
More than 40,100 Palestinians have left their homes since the launch of Operation Iron Wall, according to UNRWA. Israel recently banned the agency from operating inside the country, amid revelations that Hamas operatives, including senior commanders, had been employed by the agency in Gaza and its buildings had been used as command centers.
Last week, the IDF said troops have killed more than 60 Palestinian terror operatives and detained more than 210 amid the major ongoing counter-terrorism operation. The IDF has also acknowledged mistakenly killing several civilians during the operation, including a toddler and a pregnant woman, and is probing both incidents.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s calls for the mass transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza has emboldened Israel’s far right to renew calls for annexation of the West Bank.
“The idea of ‘cleansing’ the land of Palestinians is more popular today than ever before,” said Yagil Levy, head of the Institute for the Study of Civil-Military Relations at Britain’s Open University.
The army denies issuing evacuation orders in the West Bank. It said troops secure passage for those wanting to leave on their own accord.
Seven minutes to leave home
Over a dozen displaced Palestinians interviewed by the Associated Press in the last week said they did not flee their homes out of fear, but on the orders of Israeli security forces. AP journalists in the Nur Shams camp also heard Israeli soldiers shouting through mosque megaphones, ordering people to leave.
Some displaced families said soldiers were polite, knocking on doors and assuring them they could return when the army left. Others said they were ruthless, ransacking rooms, waving rifles and hustling residents out of their homes despite pleas for more time.
“I was sobbing, asking them, ‘Why do you want me to leave my house?’ My baby is upstairs, just let me get my baby please,’” Ayat Abdullah, 30, recalled from a shelter for displaced people in the village of Kafr al-Labd. “They gave us seven minutes. I brought my children, thank God. Nothing else.”
Told to make their own way, Abdullah trudged 10 kilometers (six miles) on a path lit only by the glow from her phone as rain turned the ground to mud. She said she clutched her children tight, braving possible snipers that had killed a 23-year-old pregnant woman just hours earlier on February 9.
Her 5-year-old son, Nidal, interrupted her story, pursing his lips together to make a loud buzzing sound.
“You’re right, my love,” she replied. “That’s the sound the drones made when we left home.”
Hospitality, for now
In the nearby town of Anabta, volunteers moved in and out of mosques and government buildings that have become makeshift shelters — delivering donated blankets, serving bitter coffee, distributing boiled eggs for breakfast and whipping up vats of rice and chicken for dinner.
Residents have opened their homes to families fleeing Nur Shams and Tulkarem.
“This is our duty in the current security situation,” said Thabet A’mar, the mayor of Anabta.
But he stressed that the town’s welcoming hand should not be mistaken for anything more.
“We insist that their displacement is temporary,” he said.
Staying put
When the operation started on February 2, Israeli bulldozers ruptured underground pipes. Taps ran dry. Sewage gushed. Internet service was shut off. Schools closed. Food supplies dwindled. Explosions echoed.
Ahmad Sobuh could understand how his neighbors chose to flee the Far’a refugee camp during the military’s 10-day incursion. But he scavenged rainwater to drink and hunkered down in his home, swearing to himself, his family and the Israeli soldiers knocking at his door that he would stay.
The soldiers advised against that, informing Sobuh’s family on February 11 that, because a room had raised suspicion for containing security cameras and an object resembling a weapon, they would blow up the second floor.
The surveillance cameras, which Israeli soldiers argued could be exploited by Palestinian terrorists, were not unusual in the volatile neighborhood, Sobuh said, as families can observe street battles and army operations from inside.
But the second claim sent him clambering upstairs, where he found his nephew’s water pipe, shaped like a rifle.
Hours later, the explosion left his nephew’s room naked to the wind and shattered most others. It was too dangerous to stay.
“They are doing everything they can to push us out,” he said of the IDF, which, according to the UN, has demolished hundreds of homes across the four camps this year.
The army has described its ongoing campaign as a crucial counterterrorism effort to prevent attacks like October 7, and said steps were taken to mitigate the impact on civilians.
A chilling return
The first thing Doha Abu Dgehish noticed about her family’s five-story home 10 days after Israeli troops forced them to leave, she said, was the smell.
Venturing inside as Israeli troops withdrew from Far’a camp, she found rotten food and toilets piled with excrement. Pet parakeets had vanished from their cages. Pages of the Quran had been defaced with graphic drawings. Israeli forces had apparently used explosives to blow every door off its hinges, even though none had been locked.
Rama, her 11-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, screamed upon finding her doll’s skirt torn and its face covered with more graphic drawings.
AP journalists visited the Abu Dgehish home on February 12, hours after their return.
Nearly two dozen Palestinians interviewed across the four West Bank refugee camps this month described army units taking over civilian homes to use as dormitories, storerooms or lookout points. The Abu Dgehish family accused Israeli soldiers of vandalizing their home, as did multiple families in Far’a.
The Israeli army blamed terror operatives for embedding themselves in civilian infrastructure. Soldiers may be “required to operate from civilian homes for varying periods,” it said, adding that the destruction of civilian property was a violation of the military’s rules and does not conform to its values.
It said “any exceptional incidents that raise concerns regarding a deviation from these orders” are “thoroughly addressed,” without elaborating.
For Abu Dgehish, the mess was emblematic of the emotional whiplash of return. No one knows when they’ll have to flee again.
“It’s like they want us to feel that we’re never safe,” she said. ”That we have no control.”
Broad crackdown on terror groups since October 7
Tensions ratcheted up in the West Bank after the Hamas terror group invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault, sparking the ongoing war.
Since then, troops have arrested some 6,000 wanted Palestinians across the West Bank, including more than 2,350 affiliated with Hamas. In that time, the IDF have carried out more than 100 airstrikes in the West Bank, using drones, attack helicopters, and fighter jets.
According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, more than 900 West Bank Palestinians have been killed in that time. The IDF says the vast majority of them were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 48 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another eight members of the security forces were killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.
