--- title: "Hebron’s Lockdown Echoes the Emptied Camps of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams" description: "Bulldozed camps, homes turned into barracks and a village ordered out near Jenin: the West Bank’s houses are being taken one by one" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-11-01T07:34:55Z modified: 2026-11-01T13:11:43Z url: https://rews.cc/a/hebron-s-lockdown-echoes-the-emptied-camps-of-jenin-tulkarem-1babce language: en tags: ["israel", "gaza", "refugees", "war", "demolition", "mideast"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Hebron’s Lockdown Echoes the Emptied Camps of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams *Bulldozed camps, homes turned into barracks and a village ordered out near Jenin: the West Bank’s houses are being taken one by one* By Jan Sokol · November 1, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/hebron-s-lockdown-echoes-the-emptied-camps-of-jenin-tulkarem-1babce ## In brief - Israel locked down Hebron after a 23 October attack killed two soldiers; more than 3,000 residents have reportedly been displaced - UNRWA’s Roland Friedrich said Hebron carries ‘alarming echoes’ of the 2025 displacement from three northern West Bank camps - More than 34,000 refugees from Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps remain displaced, more than a year after ‘Iron Wall’ began - Forensic Architecture verified 200+ incidents of buildings and streets destroyed across four camps and found systematic destruction - Israel’s army has ordered all residents of a village near Jenin to leave permanently and turned homes in Burin into barracks On 23 October gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, and Israel closed Hebron, the largest city in the occupied West Bank. A week later the closure was still in force. Homes had been turned into military posts and barracks, and [according to an Al Jazeera explainer](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/29/a-week-of-israels-lockdown-in-hebron-whats-happened-when-will-it-end) more than 3,000 people had been forced out of the city. Earlier reports put the figure closer to 5,000. Displacement is hard to count while it is still going on. The UN agency for Palestine refugees has seen this before. Roland Friedrich, UNRWA’s director for the West Bank, [said on 27 October](https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/176396) that Hebron’s near-total lockdown carried “alarming echoes” of what happened in the northern West Bank in early 2025, when Israeli military operations emptied the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams. [Writing for Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/11/1/israels-war-on-homes-from-hebron-to-gaza-and-southern-lebanon), Mohamed Hussein follows that echo north, and it leads to the same place each time: Palestinian families whose hope of going home is being demolished along with the home itself. ![A family walks through a ruined landscape with three freestanding stone doorways opening into darkness and red paths extending from their thresholds.](https://rews.cc/img/012f6c042a869e9e280dc268f7ea8f8647a5ae5e.webp) An echo is a sound that comes back. The people of the northern camps have not. ## The camps that emptied Israel called the operation “Iron Wall”. It began in January 2025, and it destroyed more than half of the residential buildings in the camps. More than a year later, UNRWA says, over 34,000 refugees from Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams are still displaced. Many of them are the grandchildren of people displaced once already, in 1948, and the camps were the temporary homes that became permanent. Now even those are gone, and the question of when residents may return [has reached Israel’s top court](https://rews.cc/a/israel-s-top-court-asks-when-displaced-west-bank-camp-reside-5f9f48). The UN human rights office has published [a thematic report on the destruction of the camps](https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/thematic-report-destruction-palestinian-refugee-camps-northern-west-bank), covering December 2024 to January 2026. Human Rights Watch built [its own report](https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/20/all-my-dreams-have-been-erased/israels-forced-displacement-of-palestinians-in-the) on interviews with 31 displaced Palestinians from the three camps. Its researchers could not go into the camps themselves, because the Israeli military had closed them. ![A large antique key lies among rubble and ruined walls, with green weeds growing through the debris in a black and tan engraving.](https://rews.cc/img/52cee32b8e21534a9059cf91d67b0539195a9cc4.webp) ## What the ledger misses Bureaucracies count what fits into their columns. Between 2009 and October 2026, the UN humanitarian office OCHA recorded 1,399 buildings demolished in the Jenin and Tulkarem governorates and 4,139 people displaced as a result. Those numbers sound large until you set them beside the camps. OCHA’s records mostly cover demolitions ordered because a building had no permit, or ordered as punishment. A house brought down by an armoured bulldozer during a raid usually leaves no entry in that ledger. So the paperwork shows a house falling for lack of a stamp. It mostly misses the street that vanished because a column of military vehicles needed to get through. The research group Forensic Architecture went looking for what the ledger misses. In [its report on the West Bank campaign](https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025.04.25_FA_West-Bank_report.pdf) it verified more than 200 incidents in which buildings and streets were destroyed across four refugee camps, using armoured bulldozers, controlled demolitions and air strikes. Roads had been widened straight through homes and gardens to make routes for military vehicles. The researchers found the destruction deliberate and systematic, and concluded that Israel was using tactics in the occupied West Bank like those it had used in Gaza. ![A bulldozer clears a wide dirt path through a village, leaving deep tread marks between ruined stone buildings, rubble, and uprooted trees.](https://rews.cc/img/939325ecf2d22dc42a53a5ec3738c91f927f1aea.webp) ## A minister’s map For once, nobody needed to guess the intent. In February 2025 Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, said Tulkarem and Jenin would come to resemble Jabalia and Shujayea, two of the most devastated areas of Gaza. A reflection, not a finding: governments usually keep their plans in sealed files and leave others to work them out from the rubble. Here the minister described the outcome first, and the bulldozers seem to have followed his description. ## Sheep and cows The raids have not stopped. Last week Israeli forces detained four Palestinians in Tulkarem. In Burin, a village south of Nablus, troops turned several homes into barracks, [as they have in Hebron](https://rews.cc/a/israel-turns-hebron-homes-into-barracks-as-displacement-tops-d2fea7). Hebron is no longer an exception. The same method is being used in town after town. Near Jenin the army has gone further. It has ordered everyone in one village to leave, permanently. A farmer there, Jabri Yahya, described what that order means for a man whose wealth walks on four legs and grows from the ground. > “I have sheep and cows. Our entire lives are tied to this land. Last year they uprooted our olive trees, and this year they want to force us to leave. We don’t know where to go.” First the trees, then the people. The order gives a date to leave. It gives no destination.