UNRWA warned on Monday that Israeli forces’ Operation Iron Fence has emptied several refugee camps in the northern West Bank, adding that the forced displacement of Palestinian communities is “escalating at an alarming pace.” The nearly three-week operation – now the longest in the West Bank since the second intifada – began in Jenin camp and spread to the Tulkarem, Nour Shams and Fara’a refugee camps, displacing 40,000 Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA said thousands of Palestinian families have been forcibly displaced since Israeli forces began carrying out large-scale operations in the occupied West Bank in mid-2023. “Repeated and destructive operations have rendered the northern refugee camps uninhabitable, trapping the population in periodic displacement,” she said. More than 60 per cent of displacement in 2024 was the result of Israeli forces’ operations, in the absence of any judicial orders.
“Forced displacement in the occupied West Bank is the result of an increasingly dangerous and coercive environment. The use of airstrikes, armored bulldozers, controlled bombings and advanced weapons by Israeli forces has become commonplace – an extension of the war in Gaza. Such military tactics run counter to the law enforcement context in the occupied West Bank, where at least 38 airstrikes were carried out in 2025 alone.”
