Rizky Amelia
TULKAREM, occupied West Bank — Hakim Mar'i spends most of his day lying on a single bed in a temporary apartment, his disfigured leg propped up beside him. The windows, which once might have let in daylight, are sealed off with old blankets. He has no work and no money to pay for electricity, so the blankets stay. At night, his family sits in near darkness.
The apartment sits just around the corner from heaps of rubble and twisted iron reinforcing bars marking one of the entrances to the Tulkarem refugee camp, which now stands empty. For Mar'i and thousands of others, the camp was once considered temporary housing — a place of birth, marriage and ageing for families whose refugee status stretches back to 1948. That physical structure, the thing that bound generations together, has been taken away.
The consequences are not only physical. Mar'i, who is impoverished, says his family is in disarray: debts are mounting, another eviction is looming, and over the past year and a half he has repeatedly considered taking his own life.
His leg injury, he says, came while working as a labourer inside Israel in 2019. It worsened after Israeli soldiers severely beat him during the military's forced removal of his family from Tulkarem. Diabetes and other untreated conditions have compounded the damage, but the medical care he needs is beyond his means.
"This joint here is completely gone," he said, gesturing toward the swollen, blackened lower leg that keeps him from working. "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 Mar'i, sat beside him. The family home was less than a kilometre (0.6 miles) away — a 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 inside Israel. She wept as she spoke about it, and of watching Israeli forces demolish the building so a road could be cut 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."
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. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were displaced, many from families that had already been refugees for three generations. Orders declaring a closed military zone around the camps have been repeatedly renewed, and they continue to bar the former residents from returning home.
For the Mar'i family, that has meant repeated upheaval. Since January 2025, they have moved four times, starting with a converted youth centre before ending up in a cramped apartment shared with their four children, all under the age of 15. Unable to keep up with rent, they have exhausted their landlord's goodwill, and there is no longer any sign that the arrangement will end. Hakim owes money at local shops for food bought on credit, and on some nights the children eat at a neighbour's house.
"I have children. I have food. I have drink," he said. "My hands are empty. Nobody is with me. Nobody is standing beside me."
The scale of the displacement puts the Mar'i family's experience within a larger emergency. More than 33,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem camps 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.
Satellite imagery published by the United Nations shows the physical toll: 20 percent of all buildings across the three camps have been destroyed, and a further 28 percent are damaged. "The level of destruction we are seeing is severe and unprecedented," said Roland Friedrich, director of UNRWA's West Bank affairs office.
Friedrich said 85 percent of those displaced have no regular income, having lost jobs when the camps were emptied. More than 80 percent of residents are now renting — an unfamiliar expense for families who, inside the camps, had never had to pay for housing or utilities. In other words, the destruction of the camps has not only removed shelter but has pushed residents into a form of poverty they were never structured to endure.
The closed military zone is renewed every two months, Friedrich said, with no indication of when — or whether — residents will be permitted to return. "What we saw there is forced displacement," he said.
The longer the limbo continues, the more the consequences compound: untreated injuries, unpayable medical bills, mounting debt, family members scattered, and children whose childhood has been defined by packing and moving. For families such as the Mar'is, the question of when — or whether — they can go home is no longer the first one. Survival, month to month in borrowed rooms sealed against the dark, comes first.
Other Palestinians have found shelter in villages such as Dhinnaba, where Khadija Zbeidat now lives with her grandchildren in a single room after the military emptied Tulkarem. Their testimony, along with UN assessments of the destruction, has added weight to international concern: the UN raised "ethnic cleansing" concerns over Israel's West Bank operation in September.
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