PALESTINA – In early February, Israeli forces stormed Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank and began bulldozing homes, demolishing shops and tearing up roads.
Nur Shams is located just outside the northern coastal city of Tulkarem, which has been subjected to increasingly violent Israeli raids in recent years, particularly in the Tulkarem refugee camp.
Israel’s quick, deliberate destruction of the Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps has uprooted thousands of inhabitants and upended countless lives in days. Hamdan Fahmawi’s shop was damaged and vandalised in the raids – the third time in a year. On February 26, the 46-year-old, who had left the area, made the risky decision to return with his 17-year-old son and some staff to inspect his shop in Nur Shams and retrieve some cash and important paperwork.
“Israeli soldiers eventually told us to get out [of the shop and leave the camp], so we did. One of them raised his gun at us and we felt we were in danger, but thankfully nobody got hurt,” said Fahmawi. Since Israel’s assaults began on the West Bank on January 21 – days after it had to pause its devastating war on Gaza – Israeli soldiers have forcefully expelled at least 40,000 Palestinians from their homes in the camps.
The stated aim of Israel’s new raids, dubbed Operation Iron Wall, is to root out “Iranian-backed groups” affiliated with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in three refugee camps: Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams. In 2021, desperate and aggrieved Palestinian youth formed ad-hoc armed groups to resist Israel’s ever-entrenching occupation, according to a report by the International Crisis Group. However, they hardly pose a threat to Israeli soldiers or illegal settlers, instead clashing with Israeli security forces when they raid the camps. (Aljazeera)
