Executive Summary

Forced displacement remains a central mechanism of Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine, operating as a long-term strategy to reconfigure demographic and geographic realities. Since 2024, intensified Israeli operations in the northern West Bank particularly in Jenin, Tulkarm, Tubas, and Nablus have resulted in the forced displacement of approximately 40,000 Palestinians and the widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure. [1]

These outcomes are not incidental, but consequences that are structurally embedded within Israel’s expansionist policies. Displacement is a continuous and long-standing strategy that has persisted since the Nakba of 1948, aimed at uprooting the indigenous Palestinian population from their land and reshaping geographic and demographic spaces in accordance with a logic of displacement and replacement. Within this historical context, the current waves of forced displacement targeting Palestinian refugee camps in the northern West Bank cannot be understood as temporary security measures or isolated events. Rather, they represent an advanced phase in a prolonged and systematic colonial policy of exclusion, intended to empty the camps of their inhabitants and undermine their political and legal significance as living testimony to the Palestinian refugee question and the right of return. Refugee camps, in this sense, are not merely sites of humanitarian concern, but political spaces embodying the unresolved question of return.

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