More than 3,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as the Israeli army escalates a sweeping military operation that human rights experts describe as a calculated effort to permanently displace the Palestinian population. Israel has imposed a lockdown across the city and detained at least 71 people over the past four days, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society. Hebron Governor Khaled Dudin said on Monday a total of 488 families comprising 3,171 people had been displaced across the wider governorate, while Mayor Yousef al-Jabari told Al Jazeera that 3,043 of those forced from their homes are from within Hebron city limits alone.
Separately, the Israeli military continues a demolition campaign that has resulted in the destruction of residential buildings, factories and roads, while also blocking roads, raiding homes and assaulting Palestinians. The crackdown has been in place since Friday, when two soldiers were killed in a shooting near the city. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has justified it by pledging an operation “unseen” since the 1967 war.
It comes amid increased tensions across the occupied West Bank as Israeli settlers and soldiers engage in violent pogroms. Attacks on olive harvesters have been rife as aggression has been on the rise before Israel’s general election on Tuesday, in which Netanyahu is seeking re-election. According to municipal authorities in Hebron, the majority of the forcibly displaced Palestinians are women, children and elderly individuals.
Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, have systematically converted dozens of homes of the uprooted Palestinian families into military barracks and field interrogation centres. The ultimate goal, Amr added, is “to impose a new reality” that can be summarised “in one sentence: ‘more land, fewer Arabs'”. Israeli officials explicitly linked the Hebron operation to previous campaigns in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz announced their intention to apply the “Jenin camp model” to Hebron, which involves forced evacuation of residents, inspecting homes, confiscating weapons and bulldozing roads. Rights groups have compared the current attack on Hebron with the tactics used during the “Iron Wall” operation in early 2025 in the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps, which killed at least 102 people, displaced more than 33,000 and destroyed over half of their residential buildings. Katz previously said the aggressive tactics in Jenin represented “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza”, where Israel’s genocidal three-year war has killed more than 74,000 people and left the vast majority of the territory in ruins.
The resulting destruction left the Jenin camp “nearly uninhabitable”, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. Last month, a UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) report warned that the Israeli military’s actions at the three camps “appear to amount to collective punishment and raise concerns of ethnic cleansing”. Displaced Palestinians reported being told by Israeli officers that there would be no more refugee camps and that they should “all go to Jordan”.
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