suwandi-tan
TULKAREM, OCCUPIED WEST BANK — For most of the day, Hakim Mar’i lies on a single bed in a temporary apartment, his ruined leg propped up on a pillow. Blinds made from old blankets cover the windows, not for privacy but because the family cannot pay for electricity. At night, he says, they live in near darkness.
The apartment sits almost at the corner of a wasteland of rubble and twisted, gnarled iron reinforcing bars — what remains of one entrance to the Tulkarem refugee camp, which Israeli forces emptied more than 20 months ago. For Mar’i and thousands of others, the camp had long since outgrown its name; settled generations ago, it was the one constant in families whose displacement began in 1948. Now the physical structures that bound those generations together have been dismantled, leaving residents to piece together a life in whatever housing they can find.
Mar’i is 60 years old and cannot work. Diabetes and other untreated conditions have compounded a leg injury he says he sustained in 2019 while working as a labourer inside Israel. The wound, he says, grew far worse after Israeli soldiers badly beat him during the soldiers’ forced removal of his family from Tulkarem. The lower leg is now swollen and blackened, and the infection is severe.
"The medicine — by God, the medicine, I haven’t been able to get," he said. "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." Pointing to the leg, he added: "This joint here is completely gone."
The family’s hardship is not only physical. Impoverished and heavily in debt, with another possible eviction looming, Mar’i said he has repeatedly considered taking his own life over the past year and a half. "I have children. I have food. I have drink," he said. "My hands are empty. Nobody is with me. Nobody is standing beside me."
His mother, Salwa, sat beside him as she spoke of the home they were forced out of — a four-storey building less than a kilometre (0.6 miles) away. She wept as she described it: a house built floor by floor by a family first uprooted in 1948 from al-Khudayra, the Arabic name for Hadera, a city in Israel. "We really put a lot into that house," she said.
After the family was removed, the Israeli military demolished the Mar’i home so that a road could be laid through the emptied camp. "Seeing it destroyed was really painful for us — all of us," she said. Salwa now lives among strangers, in a neighbourhood emptied of the community that once sustained her.
The upheaval did not end with that demolition. Since January 2025, the family has been forced to move four times — first fleeing to a converted youth centre before ending up in a cramped apartment shared with their four children, all of them under 15. The arrangement began as a temporary kindness from a landlord; with rent now unpaid, Mar’i knows that goodwill has limits. He owes money at local shops for food bought on credit, and on some nights the children eat at neighbours’ houses.
Behind the Mar’i family’s story lies the largest single wave of forced displacement in the West Bank since Israel began its occupation in 1967. More than 33,000 Palestinians were removed from the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem camps by Israeli forces in early 2025, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) — people whose families had already been refugees for three generations. Orders declaring the area a closed military zone have been constantly renewed, and they block any return home.
The scale of damage is documented. UN satellite imagery shows that 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.
The economic consequences are equally severe, and they continue to compound. According to Friedrich, 85 percent of those displaced have no regular income after losing jobs when the camps were emptied. More than 80 percent of residents are now renting — an expense largely unfamiliar to families who, inside the camps, had never had to pay for housing or utilities.
For Mar’i, the immediate horizon is the next rent payment and the leg that keeps him from earning anything. For families such as Khadija Zbeidat’s, now sharing a single room in the village of Dhinnaba after the emptying of Tulkarem, the displacement itself has become a form of erasure: separated from neighbours, jobs, schools and services, and unable to borrow against property they no longer hold.
Friedrich noted that the closed military zone orders covering the camps are renewed every two months, with no indication of when — or whether — residents will be permitted to return. What happened in the northern West Bank, he said, constitutes forced displacement in the UN’s understanding — a designation that carries weight in international legal debate over the Israeli operation.
With each two-month renewal of the closure, the figures Friedrich cites grow harder to reverse. Temporary housing becomes long-term poverty; long-term poverty becomes debt, lost limbs, family members eating at neighbours’ doors. Mar’i’s apartment, with its blanket-darkened windows a few steps from the ruins of his family’s camp, has become the clearest symbol of a population waiting for a return date that keeps not arriving.
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