The Israeli Army Turns Jenin Refugee Camp into a “Little Gaza”

Special Envoy to Jenin (West Bank)Since January, the Israeli army has occupied Jenin, having expelled its 20,000 Palestinian residents. What remains is no longer a bustling refugee camp — there are no children playing in the streets, no scent of freshly baked bread, no clatter of motorbike repair shops, no shouts from fruit sellers. The shabab — adolescents who once carried rifles and planted homemade explosives at night to fend off Israeli incursions — are gone. The camp has been converted into a military base where troops prepare for the kind of fighting experienced in Gaza.

The operation to depopulate Jenin — largely overshadowed by the genocide in Gaza — began on 21 January, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration and during the first ceasefire in Gaza. “We were used to constant army attacks, but that day was different,” recalls Suzane, a young woman born in the camp who is completing her film directing studies. “Suddenly drones appeared, equipped with loudspeakers ordering us to leave. They said only one street would be open the next day, from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, and that we could only take our identity documents, walking in single file with our hands raised.” After hours of hesitation, she decided to follow the orders and left with her elderly mother and neighbours. “We were afraid that if we stayed, the helicopters would bomb us, as in Gaza.”

Suzane explains that they left their home wearing only the clothes on their backs, walking in line — men on the right, women on the left — beneath the buzzing of drones. They passed down the camp’s main street, which residents had named after Shireen Abu Akleh, the popular Al Jazeera journalist who was killed by an Israeli sniper while covering a raid in the camp in 2022. Since then, they have been unable to return home, not even to retrieve their belongings.

Jenin refugee camp used to be a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Israeli military personnel referred to it as “the hornets’ nest,” because down its narrow streets, entrelaced among chaotic, densely packed homes, young people ready to die were said to lurk. They accepted the inequality of their fight so thoroughly that many posed for portraits holding weapons so their families would remember them after death. The walls of the camp were covered with photos of these “martyrs,” bearing the insignias of Palestinian factions — Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the Popular Front. For the people of the camp, these fighters were their only defense against occupation: they protected them, fed them, and treated them when wounded.

Even the cemetery could no longer contain the dead: three years ago, a new cemetery was opened on the outskirts to bury the increasing number of bodies. Civilians too, including children, were gunned down by Israeli snipers — like Mahmud, who died of a bullet to the head at his front door in front of his parents. His father, Issam Abu Amiri, visited his grave every day — until now he can't even approach it. The army fired tear gas at those who tried to gather there in March to commemorate the Muslim Eid holiday.

The Palestinian Authority’s Initial Assault

Before the Israeli operation in January, it was the Palestinian Authority who acted first. Its elite forces stormed the Jenin camp, deploying drones and laying siege to force out the fighters. They cut electricity and water and warned that if militants didn’t surrender, Israel would attack. Detained youths were humiliated and forced to record videos pledging loyalty to President Mahmoud Abbas. In doing so, the corrupt and delegitimized Palestinian Authority tried to show Israel it could govern Gaza’s ruins after Hamas’s defeat. The PA’s operation lasted 48 days and left 14 dead, including 21-year-old journalism student Shatha al-Sabbagh, shot in the head at her doorstep after criticising the operation on Instagram. Al Jazeera protested loudly, and Abbas retaliated by banning its crews from working in the West Bank. In the end, it was not enough — Israel decided to take direct control, moving in after the PA had cleared the ground.

The Israeli military attacked the camp using drones, helicopters, and snipers, recalls Mohammad Abu Ali, a member of the popular committee that administered the camp. Through April, demolition operations continued across houses and infrastructure. Simultaneously, the Israeli assault on neighbouring camps, including Tulkarem, has displaced 40,000 Palestinians from their homes, the largest forced displacement in the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War. Entire neighbourhoods and vital infrastructure — such as water tanks — have been destroyed. “They had threatened many times to destroy the camp, and now they are doing exactly that: we had never seen anything like this,” says Abu Ali.

In her escape, Suzane encountered something she had never seen before. On the street soldiers forced them to walk down stood white square devices flashing red. “It was like a camera with a large circular lens that emitted a red flash as we passed, scanning our retina. Palestinians have long been accustomed to facial recognition devices, but this eye scanning is new. It felt like a film,” she warns. She says soldiers also searched mobile phones for any trace of support for the resistance: “If they find a photo, a poster, or a voice message on your WhatsApp, they beat you and take you away.”

A ghost town

Now, only Israeli soldiers remain in Jenin camp. Large yellow barriers block entrances; tanks stand guard at entry points, and troops occupy tall buildings, as this paper observed. No one may approach — in early September, two 14-year-old boys who tried to sneak back to their homes to retrieve belongings were shot dead.

Over the past eight months, Israeli troops have remained inside the camp in what senior commanders describe as an “operation to transform the terrain.” Explosions and house demolitions still echo daily. Hundreds of buildings have been flattened and the urban layout drastically reshaped. Yet this wreckage is not senseless. Israeli sources report that kilometers of new avenues and roads have been carved to ensure manoeuvrability for tanks. Defence Minister Israel Katz has affirmed that troops will remain until the end of the year.

Images released — from embedded Israeli media and some journalists who managed to enter — show whole residential blocks detonated, narrow alleys bulldozed, new surveillance cameras installed, and military watchtowers erected over the ruins. The aim is to reconfigure the space where Palestinian fighters once moved “like fish in water”: a network of alleys and dense housing inaccessible to tanks and hiding from drones, often held together by stretched tarps, allowing ambushes even through holes opened in walls. Israeli authorities emphasise that what’s taking place in Jenin is a pilot project, intended for replication in the 18 refugee camps across the West Bank.

Training for Gaza

Jenin has also become a rehearsal zone for Gaza warfare. Between January and May, four tanks from the 188th Armoured Brigade operated there before redeploying to Rafah. Soldiers from the Nachshon Battalion abandoned the camp — now a ghost town — to participate in the August ground offensive in Gaza City. Since then, reserve troops have occupied the camp.

“The Jenin camp is like a little Gaza,” says the film student. “The same low-rise buildings, the same narrow streets, the same conditions, the same people, the same fighters with the same tactics and weapons. But why have they stayed so long after emptying the camp? Not to fight, but to train for Gaza.” She admits she sometimes risks approaching the edge of the camp just to glimpse it: “You hear shots and explosions — but who are they shooting at if no one is left?”

Ending the Refugee Question

Beyond military aims, the occupation of Jenin and of other northern West Bank camps carries political weight. These refugees embody living memory of the Nakba — the mass expulsion of Palestinians that gave birth to Israel. They, and their descendants, continue to demand their right to return, as protected under international law. But their return — along with millions of Palestinian diaspora — would threaten Israel’s goal of a predominantly Jewish population.

The architectural form of the camps — homes of corrugated metal sheets, exposed brick and concrete — reflects a stance of temporariness among residents who always believed they would return one day to the towns within Israel from which they were expelled 77 years ago. That belief has passed through generations.

After fleeing under Israeli fire, Jenin refugees now take shelter with relatives or friends, in community centres, wedding halls, or university dormitories. They don’t know if they will ever return. Being refugees twice over is an alien experience: longing for homes that never truly felt like home.

Tamam Hamad, an 86-year-old woman, cannot live away from the Jenin refugee camp, where she arrived 45 years ago. Since the army expelled them, she has stayed with her daughters in an eight-square-metre dorm room at the Arab American University campus, about ten kilometres north of Jenin. The room has a kitchenette and a small bathroom — sufficient for a student, but not for a family. She sometimes walks with neighbours to the mountain opposite the campus, where the air is cleaner and there are no raids, no drones, no water or electricity shortages. Nonetheless, she says she cannot live away from the crowded streets of the camp.

“We are like one big family there,” she says. “We smell our neighbours’ cooking, hear their arguments, support each other always — laugh and cry together.” Tamam is certain that she and her eight children will return: “We will go back, even if they refuse, no matter how much they have destroyed our homes or jailed our children, we will return. Our camp will not remain empty, because we cannot live anywhere else: the camp is the water, and we are the fish".