Israeli military bulldozers are set to demolish 25 residential buildings in the Nur Shams refugee camp, a move the United Nations and Palestinian rights groups condemn as an act of systematic, forced displacement aimed at cementing permanent control over the occupied West Bank. The demolitions, scheduled to begin on December 18, will affect approximately 100 family homes, further deepening what the UN describes as "the most severe displacement crisis that the West Bank has seen since 1967".
This week's order is not an isolated act but part of a devastating year-long campaign under "Operation Iron Wall." According to the UN, Israeli forces have already damaged or destroyed nearly half (48%) of all buildings in the Nur Shams camp prior to this latest order. Roland Friedrich, Director of UNRWA Affairs for the West Bank, stated that the new demolitions "fit the pattern we have seen too often this year, with Israeli forces destroying homes to enable their long-term control over the camps in the northern West Bank, permanently altering their topography". Since the operation began in January, about 1,500 homes across three northern West Bank camps have been demolished or damaged, forcibly displacing more than 32,000 Palestinian refugees who have now been unable to return to their homes for eleven months.
Palestinian authorities and human rights organizations frame the demolitions as a strategy of "ethnic cleansing and continuous forced displacement" designed to empty and erase Palestinian camps. This policy, they argue, is part of broader Israeli plans to annex West Bank land. Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told Al Jazeera that Israel is creating a "growing situation of social death" for Palestinians in the West Bank, dehumanizing a population by treating them as a group that "has to be controlled" and that "exists as if they don’t exist".
On the ground, the human impact is catastrophic. Residents like Aisha Dama, whose four-story family home housing 30 people is slated for destruction, express profound abandonment: "On the day it happened, no one checked on us or asked about us". Ahead of the demolitions, Israeli forces permitted only homeowners whose specific buildings were targeted to briefly enter the camp under military escort to salvage belongings, performing ID checks and physical searches. Those who entered found a scene of comprehensive ruin. "I was surprised to find that there were no habitable houses," said Mahmud Abdallah, a displaced resident. "The camp is destroyed".
The demolitions occur alongside a dramatic acceleration of illegal Israeli settlement expansion, which a UN official said this year reached its highest point since the UN began tracking the activity nearly a decade ago. Just days before the Nur Shams demolition order, the Israeli cabinet approved the legalization of 19 settler outposts across the occupied West Bank, a move the Israeli watchdog Peace Now said was intended "to entrench Israel’s presence in the territories and to foreclose the possibility of a future of peace".
The international community, through UN officials, has repeatedly stated that such settlement activity and the displacement of Palestinians are violations of international law and contravene Israel's obligations as an occupying power. They have called for an immediate end to the demolitions and for the rights of displaced refugees to return to their homes. However, with each new demolition order, as Roland Friedrich warned, "this hope becomes ever more distant".