The Quiet That Followed the Bulldozers
There are places where silence weighs like dust. Walk the alleys of Nur Shams, Jenin or Tulkarm today and you will feel it: an echo of footsteps that once filled alleyways, the ghost of laughter from a schoolyard now a heap of rubble, the faint scent of za’atar and strong coffee that clings to charred doorways.
In January and February of this year, Israeli forces swept into three West Bank refugee camps with an operation they called “Iron Wall.” What followed was not only the thunder of armored vehicles and the roar of bulldozers; it was the uprooting of whole communities. Human Rights Watch—after months of interviews, satellite analysis and the verification of demolition orders—says roughly 32,000 people were forcibly displaced from their homes. Their 105-page report, titled All My Dreams Have Been Erased, describes scenes that strain easy categorization: a catalogue of loss that HRW argues amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Figures that feel like faces
Numbers are blunt instruments, but they matter. HRW documented interviews with 31 displaced residents and verified more than 850 structures destroyed or heavily damaged. A separate UN assessment tallied an even higher figure: 1,460 buildings affected.
“Ten months after their displacement, none of the family residents have been able to go back to their homes,” says Melina Ansari, a researcher who worked on the HRW report. The statement stops being abstract the moment you meet someone who has lost everything.
Hisham Abu Tabeekh is one such person. He fled the Jenin camp when soldiers arrived, he tells you with a calm that trembles at the edges. “We are talking about having no food, no drink, no medicine, no expenses… we are living a very hard life,” he says. He and his family left with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
How the expulsion unfolded
The report pieces together a harrowing choreography: soldiers storming into homes, ransacking personal effects, shouting through loudspeakers mounted on drones, ordering people out. Families say bulldozers began leveling buildings while residents fled. No temporary shelters were provided by the forces that carried out the expulsions; people packed into relatives’ homes if they were lucky, or into mosques, schools and the sparse charity centers that are already strained to breaking point.
In a terse statement, the Israeli military framed the demolitions as a necessity: “We needed to demolish civilian infrastructure so that it could not be exploited by militants.” The military did not provide a timeline for when, if ever, residents might return.
From 1948 to now: camps that kept memory alive
These camps were not recent creations. Born in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the tents that became Nur Shams, Jenin and Tulkarm grew into tightly knit neighborhoods across generations—refugee camps that became villages, then towns, then living archives of dispossession and resilience.
Walk through one and you still see the markers of that history: faded family photos tacked to balcony walls, elders who know exactly where each fruit tree was planted decades ago, the mosquito-net covers over windows because building materials were never plentiful. “You cannot just erase a life like that,” says Fatima, a woman who asked that we not use her full name. “My grandmother told stories of 1948. I told stories to my children. Now there is nowhere to tell them.”
Legal lines and moral alarms
International law draws clear lines around forced displacement in occupied territories. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the transfer or displacement of protected persons from occupied territory except where absolutely necessary for their security or for imperative military reasons, and only temporarily. HRW concludes that the mass expulsions—carried out without provision for return and accompanied by sweeping demolitions—contravened these protections.
The group does not stop at legal labels. It argues these acts sit within a broader pattern—displacement, demolition, detention without trial and increased settler violence—that together amount to crimes against humanity, invoking the harsh terms “apartheid” and “persecution” in its analysis. HRW urges international action: prosecutions of responsible officials, referral to the International Criminal Court where applicable, targeted sanctions, suspension of arms sales and trade privileges, and bans on settlement goods.
Numbers and trends that widen the lens
- Approximately 32,000 people displaced from three West Bank refugee camps during Operation Iron Wall.
- HRW documented over 850 structures destroyed or heavily damaged; UN assessments put the figure at about 1,460.
- Since 7 October 2023, Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank have climbed to nearly 1,000, per HRW’s report.
- Settler attacks surged in October 2023, with at least 264 assaults reported that month—the highest monthly total since the United Nations began tracking such incidents in 2006.
Voices from the rubble
What numbers miss is the texture: the child who no longer has a gentle slope of roof to practise soccer, the woman who spent an entire night clutching a small box of family photographs as neighbors slept on mattresses in a mosque. “We are treated like numbers,” says Ahmad, a volunteer aid worker. “But each number is a person with history, with wounds.”
Across the camps, people describe an erosion of dignity. A teacher, still unsure whether she will return to her classroom, told me she keeps thinking about the children who had never seen the sea; “now some children don’t even know where they sleep tonight,” she said. Such accounts echo across the interviews HRW conducted and the verified footage that shows homes reduced to skeletons of concrete.
Why this matters beyond the camps
Forced displacement is not only a local crisis; it is a global signal. Around the world, whether through climate stresses, war or deliberate policy, communities are being uprooted. The Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams expulsions force us to ask: when occupation and displacement are normalized as political tactics, what remains of law, of accountability, of the idea that people have the right to a home?
And there is a second, sharper question: how does the international community respond when attention is focused elsewhere? HRW’s report argues that these expulsions occurred in part while global attention was riveted on Gaza—an indication, they say, of the dangers of uneven scrutiny.
What people are asking—and what comes next
Locals and rights groups want three things: the right of return, reparations or meaningful compensation, and legal accountability for those who ordered and executed the expulsions. HRW calls for international measures designed to prevent further abuses—targeted sanctions, suspension of arms support, enforcement of ICC processes and stringent controls on settlement commerce.
“Justice will not be measured in reports alone,” says an international law expert who reviewed HRW’s findings. “It will depend on whether states dare to enforce the rules they signed up to.”
If history teaches anything, it is that displacement is easier to cause than to reverse. Rebuilding homes is practical; rebuilding trust is not. The camps’ elders, the children, the mothers who tie bandages with hands that have known other sieges—these are the people whose lives are in the balance.
Final reflection
When you read the headlines, the rubble becomes a statistic and the names vanish. But stand at the edge of a demolished courtyard and you will hear something else: the persistent human question that has always underpinned conflicts large and small—who gets to belong, and who is permitted to leave? As you think about that, consider this: in a world of competing crises, what moral duties do distant nations and distant citizens have to ensure that those questions are answered with law, not with silence?
We can close our eyes to faraway suffering, or we can allow it to expand our moral imagination. The people of Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams deserve more than memories of what once was. They deserve a future that is spoken for, defended and, when necessary, fought for in courtrooms and diplomatic halls alike.
