In January 2025, with attention focused on Gaza due to the signing of a ceasefire that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would end up breaking two months later, the Israeli army launched the largest military operation in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005. Its Defense Minister, Israel Katz, spoke then of applying “the first lesson of the method” used in the Strip there, as Apache helicopters, bulldozers and military vehicles penetrated three camps. of refugees from the north: Nur Shams, Jenin and Tulkarem. At least 32,000 civilians have fled with everything they were wearing, in the largest forced exodus to the West Bank since Israel militarily occupied it in the 1967 Six-Day War. Ten months later, they are still staying in relatives’ homes, mosques, schools or charities, with Israeli authorities making no mention of even a prospect of return. All of this – the scale and duration of displacement and the pattern of infrastructure destruction – has led the human rights NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) to conclude that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity there too, and not just in Gaza.
He claims this in a 105-page report he released Thursday under the title “All my dreams have been erased”: Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. It is the result of interviews with 31 displaced people, the analysis of satellite images and the camp demolition orders given by the Israeli army; and verify videos and photographs of the offensives.
A Human Rights Watch analysis based on satellite imagery revealed that, after six months of camp occupation, more than 850 homes and other buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. Just analyze the “zones of mass destruction”. From the heights of Jenin or Tulkarem, in recent months you could see from afar the excavators demolishing buildings or widening alleys. Local authorities see a pattern in the destruction, to create two X-shaped avenues that allow the movement of military vehicles.
Israeli troops deny residents their recognized right to return to the camps, even though there has been no fighting for months. They also shot at those who tried to reach their homes and only a few managed to collect their belongings, the NGO recalls. The army keeps all entrances blocked.
The author of the report is Nadia Hardman, an expert researcher on refugee and migrant rights at the NGO. In a telephone conversation with this newspaper, he stresses that Israel does not respect “each and every one” of the requirements of the Geneva Convention that extraordinarily allow an occupying force to forcibly displace a population. He insists that military necessity or the attempt to avoid harm to civilians is not justified in such a long operation in which safe exit to spaces with shelter and water was not guaranteed for a limited time. “Here (the Israeli authorities) didn’t even look for a pretext. In Gaza, at least, they pretended, inviting people to move to what they called humanitarian zones,” he adds.
Rather, it is a “systematic” action as part of a state plan that extends to three fields and affects numerous families. The Israeli army has changed the appearance of the camps – now virtually empty -, damaging at least 1,460 buildings, according to a United Nations analysis of satellite images last month. “In any case,” he clarifies, “forced displacement need not be permanent to be a crime against humanity.”
When launching the operation, the Israeli military spokesman had already announced that it would last “as long as necessary”. And, significantly, he named it the Iron Wall. It is the concept coined a century ago, before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, by Zeev Yabotinsky, intellectual father of the ideological current within Zionism of which Likud, the party led by Netanyahu, is part. It consists in the need to develop a “strong power” (which he called the Iron Wall) that would take away from the Palestinians any hope of stopping the advance of the Zionist project.
Officially it is a “large counter-terrorism operation”, but the report also includes statements from Israeli leaders that paint a pattern more similar to Gaza’s intentions: ethnic cleansing. The influential Finance Minister and key Netanyahu aide, the far-right Bezalel Smotrich, assured that if his neighbors “continue with their acts of ‘terrorism'”, the camps “will become uninhabitable ruins” and “their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries.” This is what the Israeli far right euphemistically calls “voluntary emigration.”
For all these reasons, Human Rights Watch calls on the International Criminal Court (which has already issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza) to now investigate the Israeli prime minister for this forced displacement in the West Bank. Also to ministers Katz and Smotrich and several senior military commanders.
