Israeli bulldozers have demolished large areas of the now virtually empty Jenin refugee camp and appear to be carving wide roadways through its once-crowded warren of alleyways, echoing tactics already employed in Gaza as troops prepare for a long-term stay, Reuters reports.
At least 40,000 Palestinians have been forced out of their homes in Jenin and the nearby city of Tulkarm in the northern occupied West Bank since Israel began its military assault just a day after reaching a ceasefire agreement in Gaza 15 months into its genocidal war.
“Jenin is a repeat of what happened in Jabalia,” said Basheer Matahen, spokesperson for the Jenin Municipality, referring to the refugee camp in northern Gaza that was emptied by the Israeli occupation army. “The camp has become uninhabitable.”
He said at least 12 bulldozers were at work demolishing houses and infrastructure in the camp, once a crowded township that housed descendants of Palestinians who were driven out of their homes in the 1948 Nakba, ‘the catastrophe’ that led to the formation of the state of Israel.
He said army engineering teams could be seen making preparations for a long-term stay, bringing water tanks and generators to a special area of almost one acre in size.
On Sunday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered troops to prepare for “a prolonged stay” in the occupied West Bank, saying the camps had been cleared “for the coming year” and residents would not be allowed to return.
The month-long operation in the northern occupied West Bank has been one of the biggest seen since the Second Intifada more than 20 years ago, involving several brigades of Israeli troops backed by drones, helicopters, and, for the first time in decades, heavy battle tanks.
READ: Efforts to displace Palestinians are in action in the West Bank, Israel media reports
“There is a broad and ongoing evacuation of population, mainly in the two refugee camps, Nur Shams, near to Tulkarm and Jenin,” said Michael Milshtein, a former military intelligence official who heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies.
“I don’t know what the broad strategy is but there’s no doubt at all that we didn’t see such a step in the past.”
Israel launched the operation saying it intended to take Palestinian resistance groups in the camps, however as the weeks have gone on, Palestinians have said the real intention appears to be a large-scale, permanent displacement of the population by destroying homes and making it impossible for them to stay.
“Israel wants to erase the camps and the memory of the camps, morally and financially, they want to erase the name of refugees from the memory of the people,” said 85-year-old Hassan Al-Katib, who lived in the Jenin camp with 20 children and grandchildren before being forcibly displaced by the Israeli assault.
Israel has also outlawed the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNWRA), banning it from its former headquarters in East Jerusalem and ordering it to stop operations in Jenin.
“We don’t know what is the intention of the state of Israel. We know there’s a lot of displacement out of the camps,” said UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma, adding that refugees had the same status regardless of their physical location.
The camps, permanent symbols of the unresolved status of 5.9 Palestinian refugees, have been a constant target for Israel which says the refugee issue has hindered any resolution of the decades-long conflict.
Many Palestinians see an echo of US President Donald Trump’s call for Palestinians to be moved out of Gaza to make way for a US property development project, a call that was endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said the operation in the northern occupied West Bank appeared to be repeating tactics used in Gaza, where Israeli occupation forces systematically displaced thousands of Palestinians as they moved through the enclave, razing their properties and leaving the enclave in ruins.
“We demand that the US administration force the occupation state to immediately stop the aggression it is waging on the cities of the West Bank,” he said.
Israeli hardliners inside and outside the government have called repeatedly for Israel to annex the occupied West Bank, a kidney-shaped area around 100 kilometres long that Palestinians see as the core of a future independent state, along with Gaza.
But pressure has been tempered by fears that outright annexation could sink prospects of building economic and security ties with Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, and face a veto by Israel’s main ally, the United States.
However, hardliners have been heartened by the large number of strongly pro-Israel figures in the new US administration and by Trump himself, who said earlier this month that he would announce his position on the West Bank within weeks.