Adel Irani drags two plastic chairs into a sunny corner of a wedding hall car park on the outskirts of Tulkarem. He sits his two youngest daughters on them, Sidar, 9, and Sima 5. Behind them, the hills in this northern part of the West Bank have been carpeted a bright green by the last winter rains. The little girls spend their whole days out of doors - they haven’t set foot in school for over a month after having had to vacate their home in Nour Shams refugee camp, just down the hill, in the middle of the night. Their father goes back down there regularly, clandestinely, to take food and above all water to his mother and an invalid sister who have remained behind with another sister who looks after them. “They’re all alone - most of my family, my brother, some cousins, my wife, are up here,” Adel tells me. His light green eyes have dark circles under them.
On 9 February, at 2am, this 45-year-old Palestinian was awakened by the sound of explosions. “We turned on all the lights in the house, opened all the doors,” he recounts calmly: he wanted to keep the soldiers from suspecting hostile activities. His neighbour, he tells me, was killed when his front door was blown in. The Israeli soldiers began by flying a drone equipped with a reconnaissance camera into Irani’s living room before entering the house themselves and ordering the family out: “I told them, ’I have to take some things with me, I have my children’. They told me : ’Leave as you are’. So I took my kids and I left,” Adel says. That night, the soldiers killed Sondos Shalabi, 23, who was eight months pregnant. Her unborn child couldn’t be saved, the Israelis having blocked the rescuers, as the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported. Her husband was seriously wounded. The Israeli army announced, as per usual, that they had opened an inquiry.
According to UNRWA, the UN agency that cares for the Palestinian refugees, some 49,000 Palestinians have been forced out of their homes since mid-January 2025, after Israel had launched an umpteenth military operation dubbed “Iron Wall” in the refugee camps of the governorates of Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank. Many of these people have wound up in the homes of relatives, some have taken rented rooms, and sixteen families, including Irani’s, have landed in Kafr al-Labad where this wedding hall was taken over to house them. The Israeli army denies evicting the inhabitants, claiming they left of their own free will to escape the fighting. “The Israeli forces resort to air strikes, armoured bulldozers and remote-controlled explosions in the West Bank”, UNWRA charged in a tweet on X on February 10th. “These military tactics have made the camps in the North uninhabitable.”
Finish with the camps
Immediately after the ceasefire in Gaza came into effect, on 19 January, Israel increased its focus on the West Bank, declaring its intention to “intensify its offensive operations” in this area, even including that in its “war objectives”. Since then, the Israeli army has killed 100 Palestinians, including eight children, most of them in the northern governorates – and three Israeli soldiers have also been killed. In Kafr al-Labad, the images of a devastated Gaza remind everybody of the scenes their parents and grandparents lived through during their exodus in the 1948 Nakba, when Israel was born. “But here it’s not like in Gaza,” Adel clarifies. “We haven’t seen anybody attacking Israel. And the Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to be on our side, just sits cosily in its barracks.”
In the north of the West Bank the Israeli army is fighting the groups that resumed the armed struggle against the occupation three years ago. At first these battalions were embryonic in Jenin, now they have spread to Tulkarem, Nour Shams, Tubas. Adel grimaces, scratching the new pepper-and-salt stubble that covers his cheeks. In his opinion, Israel knows full well where the guns and the fighters are. But their army feigns ignorance to have a pretext for attacking the refugee camps:
“Who armed those men? How can Israel not know how those guns came in? When the soldiers arrived [on 9 February] there were no men with guns in my sector. The Israeli soldiers didn’t look worried. They were scrolling on TikTok.”
For him it’s clear : “Israel wants to finish with the camps and the issue of the Palestinian refugees.” The first stage, he continues, was to outlaw UNWRA, the UN agency that takes care of them. Two laws were passed at the end of January 2025, one banning its activities in Israel and East Jerusalem, the other forbidding any contacts with Israeli officials.
The people displaced from Nour Shams are all descended from the Palestinian refugees of 1948, most of whom were from Haifa and its environs, on the coast a little less than 100km from here. Still today, many dream of returning to the land of their ancestors, on the basis of the “right to return” enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948. The recent evictions have revived that traumatic memory.
Seated in the shade of the stairs leading to the wedding hall, Fatima Shehab watches the other women mashing potatoes in huge tubs, preparing the Iftar meal for breaking the fast. Despite her elegant black dress with its violet embroidery, she looks a lot older than her 63 years.
The absence of the Palestinian Authority
Where will these displaced people go when the wedding season resumes, now that Ramadan is over and the sense of emergency will have evaporated in everyone’s minds? Fatima wants to believe she’ll go back home in just a few days, a few weeks at most. She shakes her head when others refer to what the Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, implied recently: that the army would stay put “for the coming year” in certain parts of the West Bank. “Inshallah, soon” she insists, rearranging her dark blue veil. “Anyhow, where else can we go?” Her husband, Youssef, is in bed, in the room reserved for the men; he can’t walk, he is permanently hooked up to an oxygen tank. His condition is getting worse.
In the other, bigger room, where the women and children live, there are piles of clothing in the doorway - gifts from people who live in the vicinity. At the back of the room, on the podium, the bride’s throne is untouched, surrounded by white artificial flowers. Sheets have been hung up to create rooms and provide a bit of privacy. It’s hard to sleep in this poorly-heated hangar; worry makes sleep fitful. “The people of Kafr al-Labad are very kind, but my house is more comfortable,” Fatima Shehab murmurs.
Next to her, a woman is getting upset: “The governor has only come once, before we got here! The Palestinian Authority hasn’t come at all!” Then her tone changes, and she says she “doesn’t understand anything about things like that,” i.e. politics.
Muzna Abdallah is 32, and her three-year old son, sitting in silence on her lap, is handicapped: “He has epileptic fits, he needs physiotherapy and speech therapy.” He had a brain haemorrhage during an Israeli raid. Today he needs medicines and constant treatments, he can’t talk, he can’t walk, his sight and hearing are impaired. “If my son didn’t need treatment, I wouldn’t have left,” the young mother, dressed all in black, goes on. “I’m used to the camp, it’s my home, my life.”
Importing methods from Gaza
The West Bank has been subjected to brutal repression by the Israeli army since the spring of 2021, initiated by Naftali Bennett’s so-called cabinet of national unity which preceded the present far-right coalition in power. After 7 October, army and settler violence exploded. On all the shared highways of the West Bank, graffiti on the concrete blocks that are part of the occupation’s architecture call for revenge, the destruction of Gaza and the glory of Israel. The Arabic names of towns are often obliterated. At least 911 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis since 7 October according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
In a report published on 10 March, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem denounced the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, with the importation of the brutal military methods previously confined to the coastal enclave: forced population displacements, an unofficial policy of relaxing the regulations on opening fire, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has also stressed, resulting in a huge rise in the death toll of minors, and a resort to air strikes at a level unseen since the second Intifada. This reality goes hand in hand with explicit Israeli official declarations. “Tulkarem and Jenin are going to look like Jabaliya and Shujayia” was the threat issued by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on 11 February, referring to parts of the Gaza strip that have become huge wastelands.