The Electronic Intifada 4 March 2025
Fidaa Abu Zeina standing in front of his door in al-Faraa refugee camp near Tubas.
Feces, urine and used condoms – these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault on the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, south of Tubas in the northern occupied West Bank, last month.
Fidaa Abu Zeina’s home was one of them. Abu Zeina, 46, his wife and three children were forced out at gunpoint on 2 February, the first day of the assault. Given their home’s location at the entrance to the camp, theirs was the first case of expulsion.
Using his home as a military outpost, soldiers lived, slept and ate in Abu Zeina’s house for 11 days, during which they vandalized it beyond recognition, leaving a stench of urine, and feces and used condoms on the floors and in the closets.
“I lost my mind when I saw the inside of my home for the first time after they withdrew. It’s a garbage dump, it’s uninhabitable. There’s no home anymore,” Abu Zeina, a former welder, told The Electronic Intifada from his bare living room, which he had to empty of all the furniture that had been ruined by soldiers.
“They told us we had five minutes to grab our belongings and leave, and to come back a month later,” Abu Zeina said. “The soldiers tried to force us to leave the camp, but I refused. I told them they can bomb my house and me along with it. In the end, they let me go to my father’s house in another part of the camp.”
The trashing of his home was not the only horror that Abu Zeina has had to endure over the past months. In September 2024, his son Majed, 16, was executed by soldiers in the street as he pleaded for his life. Soldiers then mutilated the boy’s body with an armored bulldozer and paraded him around the camp, documented in a widely shared video.
On a dresser in another room of his home, a ripped-up Quran sits below a mirror upon which vandalized photographs of Majed are hung. Soldiers drew male genitalia in black marker on the boy’s mouth.
Largest displacement since 1967
Israel’s military assault on the al-Faraa refugee camp came as part of a wider ongoing attack on cities and refugee camps in the northern occupied West Bank. This began in Jenin refugee camp on 21 January, two days after the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip came into effect, pausing 16 months of genocide.
At least 60 Palestinians have been killed and dozens more wounded across the northern West Bank since the start of the operation. Some 40,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes, with the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps almost completely emptied.
Israel’s current assault is the longest in the occupied West Bank in more than two decades, and it is the largest operation of forcible displacement there since 1967.
Hundreds of homes have become uninhabitable, while vast stretches of roads have been dug up with bulldozers, both in the refugee camps as well as in the cities themselves, affecting all aspects of life for residents.
People gather on a hilltop to see what is happening to their homes in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm.
Omar Abu al-Hassan, head of the al-Faraa refugee camp’s popular committee, which tends to residents’ needs in the absence of a formal administrative authority, told The Electronic Intifada that Israeli forces used “the majority of the camp’s homes and the surrounding buildings as military outposts and expelled their residents.”
Abu al-Hassan managed to remain inside the camp with about half the camp’s residents during the assault. When he emerged following the troop withdrawal, he was “extremely shocked,” he said.
“There is no excuse whatsoever for all this destruction. There was no use for the large number of soldiers that were deployed in the camp, many of them had nothing to do except vandalize, raid homes and harass people,” he said.
He estimated that the Israeli military had caused more than a quarter of a million dollars in damages, including to the central road, which was torn up by bulldozers, and to water, sewage, electricity and telecommunications networks.
Watching from a distance
About an hour’s drive west of Tubas lies the city of Tulkarm, home to two large Palestinian refugee camps, the Tulkarm camp and Nur Shams.
The camps are populated by those who were forcibly displaced from their homes and lands in the coastal cities of Jaffa, Haifa and Caesarea in 1948 and their descendants.
Caesarea is only a half an hour’s drive away from Tulkarm – neither Jaffa nor Haifa are that much farther – yet its original residents – still living in these camps – are not allowed to visit, let alone return.
On a crisp winter morning in February, small crowds, including elderly men and children, gathered on top of a high hill to gaze out at the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm. This has become a daily practice for many since they were forced out of their homes in the camp starting in late January.
“I come here every single day, from morning till sunset. I only leave to pray and have lunch,” said Qais Tawfiq Khalifa, a father of four.
“I do not have a single piece of information about what happened to my house. The entire neighborhood has been emptied. I just stare at it from here,” he continued, pointing to his home in the distance. “It’s the yellow house behind the mosque, next to the pink house.”
This isn’t the first or second time that Khalifa has been forced to leave his home. On 19 December, soldiers demolished part of his home during a raid. “To this day, the back portion of my house is destroyed. It’s covered with canopies,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
This time, however, the invasion was different, he said. “This is the longest we’ve experienced estrangement. We are not accustomed to being out of our homes for this long,” said Khalifa.
Like Khalifa, Raafat al-Banna, 36, has not seen his home since the start of the invasion. Amid piles of rubble and pools of sewage water, al-Banna stood on the outskirts of the Tulkarm refugee camp trying to assess the damage.
“The only thing I know about my house is that the foundations have been destroyed. I have storage units under my house which soldiers raided and destroyed. The house is without pillars and may fall at any moment,” al-Banna told The Electronic Intifada. “Any move and it will come falling down.”
He explained that occupation soldiers forced him and his family out at gunpoint on the first day of Tulkarm’s invasion.
“They besieged the camp before raiding the neighborhoods, forcing people out and searching the homes. They entered my house, vandalized it and gave us 10 to 15 minutes to get our belongings and leave,” said al-Banna.
“We had to leave, we were not given a choice.”
Israel has said it will keep its army stationed in the cities and camps of the northern occupied West Bank for the coming year.
Faisal Salameh, the city’s deputy governor, told The Electronic Intifada that the Palestinian Authority has no information on whether or not the army may withdraw before that.
He explained that PA’s security forces, including police, have not been allowed to operate due to the presence of the Israeli military in the streets, since the start of the ongoing assault.
“In reality, Israel has re-invaded and imposed direct military occupation on the cities of Tulkarm and Jenin,” said Salameh.
“They are imposing facts on the ground, imposing a policy of coexistence with the presence of the military without any resistance. In other words, they are saying ‘these areas are under our sovereignty.’”
Zena Al Tahhan is an independent writer and TV reporter based in occupied Jerusalem.
