After the camps were emptied: West Bank families face debt, debt and no way home

In a cramped apartment in the occupied West Bank, Hakim Mar'i spends his days lying on a single bed with his disfigured leg raised. The windows of the flat — his latest temporary shelter — are covered with old blankets, because he cannot afford to pay for electricity. At night, his family lives in near darkness. The building sits just around the corner from mounds of rubble and twisted iron, the remains of one entrance to the Tulkarem refugee camp, which Israeli forces emptied more than 20 months ago. For Mar'i and thousands of others, the camp was a home once considered temporary. Now, the physical structure that tied generations together has been erased.

Mar'i cannot afford treatment for the injury that prevents him from working. He says he sustained it while working as a labourer inside Israel in 2019, and that it worsened when Israeli soldiers severely beat his family as they were forced out of Tulkarem. The wound has since developed severe infections. Untreated diabetes and other conditions have compounded the problem, but the medical care he needs is beyond his means. "This joint here is completely gone," he said, gesturing at the swollen, blackened lower leg. "The medicine — by God, the medicine, I haven't been able to get. My wife and kids tell me: get out, travel. Go to America, Turkey — so I can get the medical treatment I need. I'm a sick man."

His mother, Salwa, sat beside him, less than a kilometre from the spot where the family home once stood. She wept when asked about the four-storey house her family built floor by floor after they were first displaced in 1948 from al-Khudayra — the Arabic name for Hadera, a city in Israel. After the family's removal from Tulkarem, the Israeli military razed the house so a road could be built through the emptied camp. "We really put a lot into that house," she said. "Seeing it destroyed was really painful for us — all of us."

That destruction is part of a much larger upheaval. It has been more than 20 months since Israeli forces emptied the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps in a sweeping military operation across the northern West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians whose families had already been refugees for three generations. Constantly renewed orders declaring a closed military zone now prevent their return. For the Mar'i family, the upheaval began in January 2025, with four moves in less than two years — first to a converted youth centre, and then to the cramped apartment where he now shares a space with his wife and four children, all under 15.

A year and a half of upheaval has pushed the family to the edge. Unable to pay rent, Mar'i can see his landlord's generosity run out, while a temporary arrangement that once seemed short-term stretches on with no end in sight. He owes money at local shops for food bought on credit, and some nights the children eat at neighbours' houses. "I have children. I have food. I have drink," he said. "My hands are empty. Nobody is with me. Nobody is standing beside me." He said he has considered taking his own life several times over the past year and a half.

The scale of what happened to the three camps is documented. More than 33,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem in early 2025, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) — the largest single episode of forced displacement in the West Bank since Israel's occupation began in 1967. UN satellite imagery shows that 20 percent of all buildings across the three camps have been destroyed and a further 28 percent are damaged, leaving little intact housing for families to return to.

"The level of destruction we are seeing is severe and unprecedented," said Roland Friedrich, director of West Bank affairs for UNRWA. "What we saw there is forced displacement," he said, adding that the UN's position on the operations has raised concerns about ethnic cleansing.

Friedrich said the economic consequences are just as severe. According to him, 85 percent of those displaced have no regular income after many lost their jobs when the camps were emptied. More than 80 percent of residents are now renting — an unfamiliar expense for families who, as refugees inside the camps, had never had to pay for housing or utilities. The financial strain compounds the physical ruin: no income, no savings, damaged homes, and medical needs that cannot wait.

The closure itself shows no sign of lifting. The closed military zone covering the camps is renewed every two months, Friedrich said, with no indication of when — or whether — residents will be allowed back. That leaves families in limbo, unable to plan, rebuild or return, and landlords and aid workers filling a gap that shows no signs of closing.

Other displaced families describe a similar downward spiral. Khadija Zbeidat and her grandchildren now live in a single room in the village of Dhinnaba after the Israeli military emptied Tulkarem's refugee camp. Her story echoes the Mar'is: a household that once had stability stripped away, now subsisting on credit and charity in a place that was only ever meant to be temporary.

For Mar'i, the immediate stakes are as basic as medicine and electricity. "We're already at the brink," he said. Beyond his own situation, his account points to a broader emergency: tens of thousands of families displaced from homes that no longer exist, cut off from work and income, barred by a zone order renewed indefinitely from returning, and left to absorb losses that were already the product of three generations of exile.