Three Palestinian refugee camps in the northern West Bank have stood emptied since the winter of 2025. Israeli forces cleared Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams during Operation Iron Wall in January and February of that year, in what Human Rights Watch describes as the largest mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967. [1] Defense Minister Israel Katz said at the time that the displacement would last one year. [1] Roughly eighteen months on, HRW reports that the United Nations counts more than 33,000 refugees still displaced from those camps. [1]
On July 28, according to a dispatch HRW published on July 31, Katz instructed the Israeli military to take control of another Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. He did not identify which one. HRW says the instruction specified that the operation should follow what Katz called the Tulkarem, Nur Shams and Jenin model. [1]
What that model produced is documented, including by the Israeli side. Katz told the public in August 2025 that troops would stay: "The IDF will remain inside the camps at this stage, at least until the end of the year, under my directives." [3] He framed the operation as a counterterrorism success, saying "Today, there is no terror in the camps, and the scope of terror alerts in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] has dropped by 80 percent," and describing the three camps as hotbeds of terror funded and armed by Iran to open another front against Israel. [3] That is the strongest version of the case for repeating it, and it is worth stating in the government's own terms.
The same reporting records what the camps look like from the other side of the operation. UNRWA counted roughly 40,000 people displaced in May 2025 and about 30,000 still displaced that July. [3] HRW's November 2025 report cited UN OCHA data putting displacement from the three camps at approximately 32,000 over six months. [2] The figure HRW attributes to the UN now is more than 33,000. [1] Those four numbers come from three different UN bodies and do not measure the same population at the same moment: two count people displaced, two count people still displaced. The record does not resolve into a single figure, and averaging them would invent one.
What is consistent across all of them is that most of the people cleared out have not returned. HRW says the military has systematically demolished residential homes and buildings in the camps, and that the displaced are renting accommodation, staying with relatives or seeking temporary housing. [1]
HRW's legal conclusion needs stating precisely, because it is frequently reported as though a court had reached it. In November 2025, in a report built on interviews with 31 internally displaced Palestinians conducted between March and August 2025, Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces had committed forcible displacement in violation of the law of occupation, amounting to war crimes, and forcible transfer of population and other inhumane acts as part of a widespread or systematic attack, constituting crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute. [2] The report cites Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits forcible transfer within occupied territory, and Articles 55 and 56 on an occupying power's obligations. [2] HRW restated the finding in its July 31 dispatch: it "found in November 2025 that these acts of forced displacement amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity." [1]
Human Rights Watch is an advocacy organisation. Its finding is a finding by an advocacy organisation, reached through its own investigation, and no court has adjudicated these facts. That distinction does not make the finding weightless. It does mean the sentence "HRW concluded" cannot be shortened to "it was found," here or anywhere.
HRW goes further than the legal characterisation in its recommendations. The organisation names Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz as officials who it says should be investigated and prosecuted, and calls on governments to impose targeted sanctions, suspend arms transfers, ban trade with settlements and support International Criminal Court investigations. [1]
On the question of an Israeli response, the record is partial and should be reported as partial rather than as silence. For its November 2025 report, HRW wrote to the Israeli military on October 15, 2025 with preliminary findings, and the IDF International Press Desk replied on October 29, 2025; that reply is reprinted as an appendix to the report. [2] The July 31 dispatch does not state whether HRW sought comment from the Israeli government or military on the July 28 instruction specifically, and it does not carry a response. Searching for an Israeli government statement addressing the July 28 order, I did not find one. Absence of a response in the sources available is not evidence that none was given.
Two details in HRW's own dispatch do not track the calendar cleanly. The dispatch describes the situation as it stands "twenty months later" and refers to homes the refugees were living in "two years ago." Operation Iron Wall began in January 2025, which puts July 31, 2026 at about eighteen months out, not twenty, and the homes in question were occupied eighteen months ago rather than twenty-four. The gap is small and does not affect the substance.
What the July 28 order does not contain is the name of the camp. Until that appears, the most specific public information about its consequences is the operation it cites, and that operation is three camps that in eighteen months nobody has been allowed to move back into.
