For Mohammed Rahal, a Palestinian father who survived 18 months of displacement after Israeli forces drove him from his original home in Jenin Refugee Camp in the occupied West Bank, the dream of stability was short-lived. After pooling every resource he and his sons could gather to purchase a new home on the edge of the camp and working up to 20 hours a day for months to ready the space for his extended family, Israeli soldiers arrived at his door with a new order: evacuate the property immediately so it could be converted into an Israeli military outpost for a minimum of two months.
Rahal’s story is far from an isolated case. The seizure of private Palestinian civilian homes for military use has become a rapidly growing practice across the occupied West Bank, a trend that has accelerated sharply since October 2023, amid a broad intensification of Israeli military crackdowns across the territory. When Israel launched a large-scale offensive across the northern West Bank districts of Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas in early 2025, the operation left a trail of destruction across the region’s refugee camps: hundreds of structures were demolished, burned or seized by military forces, pushing nearly 40,000 Palestinians from their homes. The overwhelming majority of those displaced are residents of Jenin Refugee Camp.
Human rights organizations and global policy experts have formally condemned the campaign, accusing Israel of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing in its West Bank offensive. Rahal was among the first to flee when the January 2025 offensive began; his original multi-family building, home to him, his five brothers and all their extended families, was partially destroyed in the operation. For 14 months, his entire clan crowded into overcrowded student housing at the Arab American University, a period he describes as marked by unrelenting hardship. Determined to rebuild a stable life, the family scraped together savings to buy their new property in Jabriyat, a hillside neighborhood overlooking Jenin Refugee Camp.
The Rahal home sits on the edge of a seven-dunum plot of land that Israeli forces seized in May 2025, despite the area falling under Oslo Accords designation as Area A — territory formally administered by the Palestinian Authority. Just two months after the Rahal family moved in, Israeli soldiers arrived on a Tuesday and ordered them to evacuate within 10 minutes. After negotiations with the family, the deadline was extended to the following Thursday morning, giving Rahal just 48 hours to remove all the furniture and belongings he had spent weeks acquiring and arranging. Today, he waits for the evacuation order to expire on August 23, clinging to faint hope he will be allowed to return, but deeply skeptical of Israeli promises.
“Even though the order is for two months, the occupation is unpredictable,” Rahal said. “They could extend the takeover for another period, and then another, until the house is seized permanently.”
Down the street from Rahal, Fidaa Abu al-Haija received an identical evacuation order. Her home overlooks the newly seized land, a location that has fueled widespread local fears that the military takeover is intended to be permanent, with Israeli forces planning to build a full military camp across the confiscated plot, expanding seizures to encompass the entire neighborhood over time. Abu al-Haija lives in the home with her three children; her husband has been held in an Israeli prison for nearly four years. Her brother-in-law, also imprisoned by Israel for more than four years, received an evacuation order for his nearby home as well, forcing his family of four to leave their property too.
Long before the formal evacuation order, Abu al-Haija said, Israeli forces carried out repeated raids on her home during the Jenin offensive, traumatizing her young children and damaging rooms so badly that much of her furniture is already unusable. She often was forced to abandon trips home from work mid-journey, when military checkpoints and deployments blocked access to the neighborhood. “I knew they wouldn’t leave me alone,” she said. The formal eviction order marks a dangerous new escalation, she added, and with her husband’s original family home inside Jenin Refugee Camp already destroyed, she has no safety net. As workers carried her belongings out of her home, she told reporters she was scrambling to find an affordable rental while trying to salvage what little remains of her family’s life.
“The furniture is piled up outside because I want to save it before it’s destroyed,” she said. “We’ve been living through this tragic situation for more than a year.”
Jabriyat’s vantage point overlooking Jenin Refugee Camp makes it strategically valuable to Israeli forces, and increasingly dangerous for the Palestinian residents who call it home. Mu’tasim Istaiti, a neighbor who already survived more than a year of displacement when soldiers seized his home during the initial offensive, returned to the neighborhood to protect his property only to find the area transformed. “Since we came back, it feels like we’re living in a ghost town,” he said. “All we hear are military vehicles. This used to be a vibrant neighborhood. Now it’s almost deserted.” Over safety fears, he rarely allows his children to leave the home unaccompanied, and Israeli forces have blocked the neighborhood’s main access road with barbed wire, forcing residents to take a dangerous, unpaved alternative route. “We know staying here is dangerous, but we want to protect our homes until the very last moment,” he said. “We don’t know what the future holds for our children and us after the decision to confiscate the land near us.”
Mohammad Jarrar, mayor of Jenin, told Middle East Eye that Jabriyat is one of the city’s largest residential neighborhoods, home to roughly 10,000 Palestinian residents. At least 15 families have already been forced from their homes in the neighborhood since the early 2025 offensive began, and Israeli restrictions have blocked Jenin municipal crews from accessing areas near the camp to deliver basic services to residents who remain. In one case, a broken sewage pipe has flooded local streets, creating a severe public health hazard, but workers have not been permitted to reach the site to make repairs.
“We fear the displacement of these families will become permanent,” Jarrar said. “The occupation appears intent on displacing as many residents as possible out of the neighborhoods surrounding the camp.” According to Jenin municipal data, approximately 800 families have already been displaced from neighborhoods across Jenin city, not counting the thousands more displaced from the Jenin Refugee Camp itself. “Even those who remain are being pressured through the withholding of services,” Jarrar added. “The aim is to make life so difficult that people leave on their own.”
Global human rights advocates warn that the accelerating pattern of home seizures and forced displacement in northern West Bank marks a dangerous escalation of Israel’s decades-long occupation, with long-term consequences for the territorial and humanitarian status of the region.
