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The streets looked like Gaza. Homes reduced to rubble, walls pockmarked by bullet holes, roads ripped apart by bulldozers. Neighborhood after neighborhood was deserted.
But this was not Gaza, a territory devastated by the war between Israel and the militant group Hamas, where tens of thousands have been killed and hunger stalks the population. It was the occupied West Bank, another Palestinian territory where the Israeli military has been tightening control in the most sweeping crackdown on militancy there in a generation.
The contours of the new offensive were unfolding during a recent visit by New York Times reporters to the city of Jenin, among the once densely populated neighborhoods that have been cleared out since an operation began in January. In one of those areas, more than 10,000 people lived until recently. Now, it is empty — its roads blocked by mounds of dirt and flanked by piles of rubble.
This week, the Israeli military said it would be demolishing homes in Tulkarm, a city near Jenin, to make crowded neighborhoods and streets more accessible to Israeli forces and to prevent the re-emergence of militants.
“They’re taking away my future,” Muath Amarne, a 23-year-old university student, said on Wednesday, the day he learned that his home in Tulkarm would be destroyed.
Israel conducted frequent military operations in this area in recent years, but its forces almost always left within hours or days. Since January, however, its military has maintained its longest-running presence in the heart of West Bank cities in decades.
The campaign has targeted Hamas and another Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad. In recent weeks, however, clashes have become rare, in a sign that Israel and the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank have arrested or killed many of the militants.
The two cities most affected, Jenin and Tulkarm, have long been controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that cooperates with Israel on security and which many Palestinians hoped would evolve into the government of a future state.
But Israel’s extended presence in these West Bank cities is undermining the powers of the Palestinian Authority. Israel has argued that the Authority was not doing enough to tamp down militancy in the territory.
“We’re at a turning point in the conflict,” Mohammed Jarrar, the mayor of Jenin, said in an interview at his office in March. “Israel is acting as if the Palestinian Authority doesn’t exist.”
The Israeli assault began days after a cease-fire in Gaza took hold in January. Around that time, the government added a new objective to its war goals: delivering a blow to West Bank militants.
Days later, armored vehicles backed by helicopters streamed into the Jenin camp.
Israel said it has killed more than 100 militants and arrested hundreds since the operation began. It has displaced roughly 40,000 Palestinians — more than any other military campaign in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Middle East war.
That has summoned fears among some Palestinians of a second nakba — the Arabic word for disaster that is used to describe the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to go home like in 1948,” said Saleema al-Saadi, 83, a resident of the Jenin camp who said she had been displaced once before nearly eight decades ago.
In late February, Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israeli forces to prepare to remain in Jenin and Tulkarm for the next year.
If that happens, it would be a major change in the way West Bank cities have been governed since the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. Around that time, Israel ceded most governing responsibilities over the cities to the Palestinian Authority.
The Times reporters visited the camp in Jenin escorted by a senior Israeli military officer in an armored personnel carrier to gain rare access to restricted areas. The Times did not allow the Israeli military to screen its coverage before publication, but it agreed not to photograph the faces of some Israeli troops.
Armed Palestinian groups had built weapons factories in the camps, barricaded themselves in the most crowded districts and planted improvised explosive devices under roads to ambush Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli forces patrol the camps in Jenin and Tulkarm day and night. They have been combing building by building in search of weapons and have been blowing up homes that they believe were used for military purposes.
They have also been expanding roads, according to aerial photos, something that would make it easier for soldiers to reach densely populated parts of the camps. The military has demolished buildings and roads that it says are riddled with terrorist hide-outs and booby traps.
“They’re signaling that they want to annex,” said Ammar Abu Bakr, chairman of the Jenin chamber of commerce, echoing a fear of many other Palestinians.
The Palestinian fears have been fed by the fact that powerful ministers in Israel’s hard-line government advocate annexation of the West Bank, home to nearly three million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers.
The camps — crowded neighborhoods that Palestinians say embody the plight of Palestinian refugees — have housed tens of thousands of people for decades. What were once clusters of tents have evolved into concrete structures in poor neighborhoods.
Mr. Abu Bakr, the chairman of the Jenin chamber of commerce, and Mr. Jarrar, the mayor, said they had been told in late January by Lt. Col. Amir Abu Janab, the Israeli military liaison for Jenin, that Israel was planning to transform the Jenin camp into a normal neighborhood, which many Palestinians oppose because they see it as an attempt to erase a symbol of the plight of refugees.
They said they had also been told that UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians and runs schools and clinics in the West Bank, would no longer have a role in the Jenin camp. Israel has long had tense relations with the agency and hostility toward UNRWA has grown since the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023 with a Hamas attack on Israel.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that liaises with Palestinians, declined to comment.
The Israeli military has denied that they forced people to leave. But Palestinians said they had been threatened with violence if they refused.
Kifah Sahweil, 52, said an Israeli drone flew close to her home in Jenin a few months ago, telling her through a speaker to raise her hands and leave. She said the drone warned her home would be targeted if she didn’t comply.
After Ms. Sahweil rushed outside with her son, the drone followed and instructed them where to go until they left the camp, she said.
“I felt that they were going to kill us,” said Ms. Sahweil.
The senior military officer who led the visit to Jenin said Israeli forces were demolishing militant infrastructure like tunnels, weapons caches, and manufacturing sites, rejecting suggestions that Israel was pursuing goals beyond restoring security. He spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol.
He pointed to a damaged former train station that had been built in 1908 when the area was part of the Ottoman Empire. He said militants had built a secret tunnel beneath it which the military blew up.
About six miles from the Jenin camp, hundreds of displaced Palestinians were scattered in apartment buildings meant for university students.
Mohammed Abu Wasfeh, 45 and a resident of Jenin camp, was helping new arrivals settle into one-room apartments while children played outside. For him, the most painful part of displacement wasn’t being forced from his home, but not knowing what had happened to it.
“We’re living in the unknown,” he said. “We’re experiencing a tortuous and destabilizing journey.”
He added: “We’ve lost control of everything.”
Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
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