Did Israel empty Jenin refugee camp to take the land?

“You might ask what was the goal in the displacement of Jenin camp? Well, it’s the same goal the settlers have: more land. The only difference is the army wears all green and puts out a press release.”

Operation Iron Wall began on 21 January 2025 in Jenin, then extended to Tulkarem and Nur Shams. By May 2025, UN satellite analysis put destruction at 43% of Jenin camp, 35% of Nur Shams and 14% of Tulkarem, with over 1,500 homes in Jenin camp destroyed outright. UNRWA called it the longest and most destructive Israeli operation since the Second Intifada and said the camps had been left uninhabitable. The camps remain closed, residents need permits to enter, and Israeli forces are still inside them in 2026.

None of that is contested here, and a page that tried to would deserve to be ignored. The question is why it happened, and “for the land” is answerable.

The five weeks the story leaves out

On 14 December 2024, five weeks before Israeli forces entered, the Palestinian Authority launched Operation Protect the Homeland against the armed factions inside Jenin camp, on Mahmoud Abbas’s order. PA security forces had arrested two men accused of channelling money to the Jenin Battalion, the camp rose against them, and the PA fought its own citizens there for weeks. The dead included six members of the PA National Security Forces and the commander of the local Palestinian Islamic Jihad brigade.

The PA did not do that for land. It did it because a joint Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades formation had made a camp inside its own territory ungovernable, and because Ramallah understood what would follow if it did not. It failed, and what followed was Iron Wall.

Any account of January 2025 that begins with Israeli bulldozers has cut the first act. The film that makes this claim goes to Ramallah to interview a Palestinian Authority brigadier general about resisting settler expansion and never mentions that the same authority had been fighting the same men in the same camp a month earlier.

Land is not what the army took

The land theory makes a prediction and the prediction failed.

Jenin camp is in Area A. Under the 1995 Interim Agreement, Area A is under full Palestinian civil and security control, and it contains no Israeli settlements. The settlement enterprise is an Area C phenomenon, built on land the Israeli state classifies as public, in blocs with planning committees and access roads and published master plans. None of that machinery has appeared in Jenin, Tulkarem or Nur Shams. What has appeared is military closure orders, renewed in six-week increments.

If the object were territory, the operation would have ended in occupation and settlement, as the ones the film compares it to did. Instead it has produced a shuttered camp inside a Palestinian city that Israel does not administer, garrisoned at a cost, with 40,000 displaced people living in the surrounding towns and a permanent international incident attached. That is what an unsolved security problem looks like when the solution taken was demolition. It is not what a land grab looks like.

The “infrastructure improvement project”

The film says the army “claimed the entire displacement was a part of an infrastructure improvement project,” then calls that hogwash. The army’s stated rationale was the destruction of militant infrastructure: weapons workshops, command positions in dense alleys, and roads its engineers said were mined with buried explosive devices, which is the reason armoured bulldozers tore up streets rather than driving on them. Charges buried under camp roads have been a documented tactic in Jenin since 2023 and are what killed Israeli soldiers there.

Reasonable people can call that rationale insufficient for 1,500 homes. Human Rights Watch did, in November 2025, and argued the demolitions and the bar on return amount to forced displacement. That is a serious argument on the record. It is a different argument from the one the film makes, which requires the audience to believe there was no military problem at all.

The land story was chosen over the one that could have landed

Proportion and return are the charges with teeth: that more was destroyed than the operation required, that tens of thousands of people have been kept out of their homes long past any military need, and that Israeli ministers said in February 2025 that they would not be going back. Those are argued in Israeli courts and in the Israeli press, by Israelis, and they are hard to answer.

The land story was preferred because it is simpler and because it welds Jenin to Masafer Yatta and to Hebron, three different legal regimes flattened into one intention and one villain. The price is the case itself. “For the land” fails at the first search anyone runs, and it takes proportion and return down with it, so the people still locked out of those camps end up represented by an argument that cannot survive a map of Area A.