Israel Escalates Siege on Qalandia Refugee Camp, Pursuing Settlement Plans |
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Iman Jahjouh was putting her daughters to bed when the soldiers came through the door early this week. A 33-year-old widow, Iman has been living in a house near her parents’ in the Qalandia refugee camp, close to the camp’s entrance and the airport road. She knows this makes her a target, since her husband’s family cut ties with her after his death.
Her two daughters, eight and ten years old, were still awake when the army raided the building during one of the recent incursions last Tuesday. What she remembers most is not the noise. “They came in and told my parents, word for word: ‘pack your things and go to a European country. This land is ours,’” she tells Mondoweiss.
Since that night, her older daughter asks every day whether they will have to leave the house. The younger one wakes in a panic at any sound from the street. “I started becoming afraid of the question itself,” Iman says. “Where would we even go?”
The threat her family received, alongside the practice of soldiers declaring residential houses a military command center and ordering their occupants out during incursions, has become one of the defining testimonies of a series of Israeli military incursions at Qalandia, just outside of Ramallah. Since January of this year, these invasions have escalated dramatically, and they follow a pattern that residents and analysts say cannot be separated from Israel’s expanding settlement ambitions in the area surrounding the old Qalandia airport.
The fear is not abstract. In January 2025, Israeli forces launched “Operation Iron Wall” in the northern West Bank, the longest military operation in the territory since the Second Intifada.
For Palestinians, the Nakba Isn’t Just History. It’s Also Our Present.
Beginning in Jenin, it expanded to Tulkarem, Nur Shams, and al-Fara’a refugee camps, forcibly displacing 40,000 Palestinian refugees over roughly three weeks.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) warned at the time that repeated, destructive operations had rendered the northern camps “uninhabitable,” trapping residents in cycles of recurring displacement, and that “Jenin camp today is emptied of its residents”, a scene the agency said was “set to be repeated in other camps.”
These 40,000 former camp residents remain displaced to this day, with the prospect of returning to their homes indefinitely suspended. Meanwhile, they continue to live in squalid conditions amid what they describe as a humanitarian crisis.
This is not a distant memory, but a documented operation from months ago, that soldiers invoke when they stand in Qalandia doorways and tell families to find somewhere else to live.
Everyone Knows What Saying “Jenin” Means
Qalandia camp was established in 1949 to temporarily house Palestinians displaced during the Nakba. It sits at the geographic seam between Jerusalem and Ramallah, adjacent to the old airport and the military checkpoint, in a location that has grown in political and strategic weight.........