Sundus Shalabi lived in the Nur Shams refugee camp, just outside of the Palestinian city of Tulkarm in the northwest of the occupied West Bank. Serviced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for its health and education needs, the camp was established in 1952. As of 2023, the camp housed nearly 14,000 people including Sundus and her husband, Yazan. Most residents originated from villages around Haifa and were displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when the state of Israel was created.
Sundus was eight months pregnant on February 9, 2025, when Israelis raided the camp. She and her husband were in their car trying to flee when they were shot by the Israeli military. Israeli soldiers delayed paramedics’ access to the couple, and Sundus and her unborn child were dead before they arrived at the hospital. Her husband was critically injured. Two other Palestinians were killed in Nur Shams that day.
That raid was just one of many that the Israeli military has carried out in West Bank refugee camps in recent years, and especially since October 7, 2023. Israeli occupation forces have raided multiple camps, especially around the cities of Tulkarm and Jenin, hit them with drone strikes, and besieged them. Reports have indicated the Israeli military has often blocked access to paramedics and hospitals.
While Israel’s continuous bombing of hospitals and kidnapping and torture of health workers in the Gaza Strip, along with the destruction of its water, food, and electricity systems, received global attention, there has been less international focus on the violence, restrictions, and the accelerating displacement of West Bank Palestinians from their land.
Unprecedented and Unchecked Violence
Since October 7, 2023, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reports that nearly 900 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including some 187 children. Almost three-quarters of these deaths were from live ammunition shot by the Israeli military. The majority occurred in Jenin Camp and Jenin, followed by the Tulkarm Camp, and the Nur Shams Camp outside of Tulkarm, and then the Balata and Far’a camps outside of Nablus. These localities are in the northern West Bank, which has historically been a center for Palestinian resistance groups and which has faced a striking increase in Israeli settler and military violence and restrictions since 2022. Nearly 8,000 Palestinians have been injured from Israeli tear gas, live ammunition, and physical assaults.
Palestinian fatalities from Israeli military actions and settler violence have reached unprecedented heights since 2023.
While Palestinian fatalities from Israeli military actions and settler violence in the West Bank have never been uncommon, they have reached unprecedented heights since 2023. In 2022, there were 154 reported Palestinian deaths in the West Bank, already the highest number of deaths in one year in more than a decade. Human rights groups were already raising the alarm, including about the numbers of Palestinian children killed: 34 in 2022. In 2023, Israeli forces killed 506 Palestinians; in 2024, 498.
So far in 2025, at least 70 Palestinians have been killed in the West bank. Other than UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez, world leaders have been essentially silent, despite the clearly indiscriminate nature of some of the killings. For example, weeks before Sundus was killed, Israeli gunfire killed 2-year-old Laila Muhammad Ayman al-Khatib while she was having dinner inside her home with her family in a small town outside of Jenin.
The Israeli push in the West Bank escalated on January 21, 2025, with the announcement of Operation Iron Wall, described by Minister of Defense Israel Katz as a “shift in…security strategy” as part of “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza.” This statement is among several signals that Israel is applying lessons learned in Gaza—primarily, that Israel will not be held accountable for violence against Palestinian civilians —throughout the West Bank. Iron Wall is now the single longest Israeli military operation in the West Bank since the second Intifada in the early 2000s.
This operation began just weeks after a series of raids and arrests by the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself focused in and around Jenin. In the largest such crackdown in years, PA security forces killed at least two Palestinians and wounded a teenage boy who was delivering food from his family’s restaurant. The PA has mimicked some Israeli tactics. For example, PA forces set up a base from within a hospital in Jenin and were shooting from inside. (It was just over a year ago when Israeli special forces dressed up as doctors entered a hospital, also in Jenin, to kill three Palestinian men receiving medical treatment.)
Displacement on a Scale Not Seen Since 1967
Another alarming trend is Israel’s displacement of Palestinians from the land that Israelis increasingly refer to as “Judea and Samaria.” Indeed, a new bill in the Knesset has called to replace the term “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria” in all Israeli government documents, deeming the area populated with more than 3 million Palestinians an “inseparable part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” Two members of the US Congress have introduced a similar bill that would “require all official United States documents and materials to use the term ‘Judea and Samaria’ instead of the ‘West Bank.’
But it is not just terminology that Israel aims to replace. Within weeks of launching Operation Iron Wall, Israeli forces and settlers have displaced some 40,000 Palestinians from the areas around Jenin and Tulkarm—including 90 percent of the population of the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps. This constitutes the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since the Israeli occupation began in 1967. Most areas that Palestinians have fled were destroyed during Israeli raids, including homes and roads, making return impossible for many, and only some 3,000 people have returned home. The rest have been staying with friends and family or sheltering in mosques and schools.
Israel’s home demolition efforts also have significantly intensified in recent years. As with Israel’s extrajudicial killings, home demolitions have been a consistent occurrence in the West Bank. Especially in Area C—where Israel maintains security and administrative control—Israel has invoked same security pretext it has used to raid and destroy the refugee camps to increase its pace of home demolitions.
While the demolition rate has been steadily increasing since 2017, 2023 saw the highest reported number of home demolitions since 2009—1,178 structures, displacing 2,300 people. In 2024, Israel destroyed 1,768 structures that were home for 4,265 people. Already in 2025, some 234 structures have been destroyed and 406 people permanently displaced. Many of the demolitions are in the south, around Hebron, or in East Jerusalem.
Increasingly Destructive Attacks by Israeli Settlers
The rise of Israeli settler violence in the past decade has not gone unnoticed. Even the Biden administration, which continued to provide weapons and political support to Israel despite credible allegations of war crimes and even genocide, ordered minor sanctions on non-US citizen Israeli settlers who had carried out violent attacks toward Palestinians, with the administration stating that “this violence poses a grave threat to peace, security, and stability in the West Bank, Israel, and the Middle East region.” Although the sanctions were largely toothless, the Trump administration reversed them almost immediately after taking office.
According to data from UNOCHA, between October 7, 2023, and January 22, 2025, there were an estimated 1,800 incidents of settler attacks that resulted in casualties or property damage—an average of nearly four attacks per day, occurring mainly in the governorates of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron.
Violent settler groups today have representation in the Knesset and widespread support in Israel and the US.
Like attacks and home demolitions, settler violence has long been part of the backdrop of Palestinian life in the West Bank. But what were once disparate attacks by fringe groups today are led by settler organizations with representation in the Knesset and widespread support in Israel and the United States. Since 2023, as Israel was destroying Gaza, settler groups hosted conferences discussing permanent displacement of Palestinians from the Strip and planning for the settlers’ eventual habitation of the territory. No longer were these efforts discrete or vague—one such conference, attended by multiple Israeli government ministers, was called “Preparing to Settle Gaza.”
Such land confiscation and displacement have never been limited to just one of the occupied territories. The permanent displacement of Palestinians and the seizure of their land to be settled as part of the Israeli state have long been open goals of many Israeli policymakers. Decades of no accountability for Israel’s rhetoric and actions have led to these predictable developments, including Israel’s establishment of a new Settlements Administration in February 2023 under Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, with the power to approve settlement construction, retroactively authorize illegally built settlements, reject Palestinian construction, and even seize Palestinian land.
In the current reality in which Israel more openly embraces discussions of displacement, land seizure, and annexation, it becomes clearer that the increase in settler violence and terrorism is not operating outside of the state apparatus, but in tandem with it. In rural areas of the West Bank, Israeli settlers have forced many sheep herders off their land by establishing their own farms and outposts there, sometimes right outside of Palestinian villages. They walk through the Palestinian areas armed, sometimes entering the homes of Palestinians at night. Knowing there is no recourse for such acts, many Palestinians flee. For the settlers, there is no pretense about what they are attempting to achieve. As one settler who works to establish such outposts told the New York Times, “It’s not the nicest thing to evacuate a population. But we’re talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.”
The Humanitarian Consequences of Increased Attacks and Restrictions
Israel’s devastation of Gaza’s infrastructure and health system was so expansive and had such massive humanitarian consequences that it became the focus of most response and relief efforts across the occupied territories. Yet Israel has also attacked healthcare workers and infrastructure in the West Bank and controlled Palestinians’ movement.
As of November 2024, Israel had imposed some 614 movement obstacles throughout the West Bank, concentrated around Ramallah, Hebron, and Nablus, including permanent and floating military checkpoints, earth mounds, roadblocks, trenches, gates, and entire roads that are built for Israeli settlers and inaccessible to Palestinians. Many Palestinians, especially those in the north, have not left their localities in months. Coupled with settler and military violence, these obstacles have destroyed the Palestinian economy. More than 300,000 Palestinians have lost their jobs, raising the unemployment rate from 12.9 percent before October 7, 2023, to 32 percent today, and severely limiting the population’s access to food, medical care, and other basic necessities.
Israel has imposed 614 movement obstacles throughout the West Bank since November 2024.
During the raids, Israel cut electricity and water services to many parts of the refugee camps. Some raids were preceded by sieges that prevented people from going to work and school or accessing food and medical supplies. In 2024 legislation, the Israeli Knesset ordered UNRWA, the main service provider for the camps, to cease operations by the end of January 2025. As of this writing, UNRWA was still operating in the West Bank, but it is unclear how this may play out in the coming weeks, with the agency’s expected demise cutting off these populations from the last provider of health and education services.
The Israeli military has also prevented Palestinians injured during raids from receiving medical care. There have been multiple instances of Israeli forces preventing ambulances from accessing injured patients. Doctors Without Borders reported that in addition to blocking ambulances from accessing patients or hospitals, Israeli forces have targeted the medical workers inside. “Paramedics and ambulance drivers were ordered out of the ambulances, stripped and made to kneel in the street. The patients were left in the ambulances,” the organization reported.
Israel has also weaponized ambulances in other ways that are clear violations of international law. For example, Israel used an ambulance to transport its forces to the Balata refugee camp in a surprise raid. Halimah Saleh Hassan Abu Leil, an 80-year-old woman in the camp who was outside talking to a neighbor during the attack, was shot and killed in an incident caught on surveillance video. “Israel is no longer trying to hide its war crimes and is acting as though the norms and rules of international law do not apply,” Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said about the killing.
Decades of Impunity Have Led to this Moment
This intensification of violence, restrictions, displacement, and land seizure were only made possible by decades of the international community decision to ignore Israel’s clear aspirations for Palestinian land and the entire legal, political, and military structures that it built to do exactly that. Although Palestinians in the West Bank have lived through multiple rough periods, the current moment seems different, especially in the aftermath of the Gaza ceasefire and a new US administration with several senior officials who have openly embraced Israel’s claim to all of historic Palestine.
Even the fragile guardrails that allowed for some semblance of normalcy in the West Bank have disappeared. Despite ongoing cases in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, no external actor has emerged to take the protection of Palestinian life seriously. The PA itself has made clear that it will not secure Palestinian life but will only secure the so-called order that the international community has thus far used to justify the PA’s continued existence, despite its rampant corruption and widespread unpopularity among the people it supposedly represents.
What is next in the West Bank? With each new incident—including the deaths of Sundus, Laila, Halimah, and hundreds more—Israeli impunity reaches new heights. The lessons from Gaza have seemingly extended past battle strategies to include the very pretense that all Israeli action toward Palestinians is permissible.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Wafa
