Israel expands expulsions in occupied West Bank to cement control

More than 3,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as the Israeli army escalates a sweeping military operation that human rights experts describe as a calculated effort to permanently displace the Palestinian population.

Israel has imposed a lockdown across the city and detained at least 71 people over the past four days, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.

Hebron Governor Khaled Dudin said on Monday a total of 488 families comprising 3,171 people had been displaced across the wider governorate, while Mayor Yousef al-Jabari told Al Jazeera that 3,043 of those forced from their homes are from within Hebron city limits alone.

Separately, the Israeli military continues a demolition campaign that has resulted in the destruction of residential buildings, factories and roads, while also blocking roads, raiding homes and assaulting Palestinians.

The crackdown has been in place since Friday, when two soldiers were killed in a shooting near the city. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has justified it by pledging an operation “unseen” since the 1967 war.

It comes amid increased tensions across the occupied West Bank as Israeli settlers and soldiers engage in violent pogroms. Attacks on olive harvesters have been rife as aggression has been on the rise before Israel’s general election on Tuesday, in which Netanyahu is seeking re-election.

According to municipal authorities in Hebron, the majority of the forcibly displaced Palestinians are women, children and elderly individuals.

Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, have systematically converted dozens of homes of the uprooted Palestinian families into military barracks and field interrogation centres.

“The measures taken in the city of Hebron are not of a single type, but rather have surpassed any idea of temporary evacuation or deportation,” said Noman Amr, a professor of contemporary history at al-Quds Open University, Dura branch in Hebron, as he explained the multifaceted nature of the displacement. “Evacuating homes falls into three categories: evacuation for demolition, evacuation for revenge and collective punishment, and evacuation for military uses, where they have turned some homes into military barracks.”

Amr also highlighted the psychological warfare at play. “This aggressive, collective punitive, terrorist, racist behaviour aims to create a state of panic, fear and instability for the Palestinian society,” he said, quoting displaced residents who said they heard soldiers make comments such as, “You will return to your homes on Judgement Day”.

The ultimate goal, Amr added, is “to impose a new reality” that can be summarised “in one sentence: ‘more land, fewer Arabs'”.

Israeli officials explicitly linked the Hebron operation to previous campaigns in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz announced their intention to apply the “Jenin camp model” to Hebron, which involves forced evacuation of residents, inspecting homes, confiscating weapons and bulldozing roads.

Rights groups have compared the current attack on Hebron with the tactics used during the “Iron Wall” operation in early 2025 in the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps, which killed at least 102 people, displaced more than 33,000 and destroyed over half of their residential buildings.

Katz previously said the aggressive tactics in Jenin represented “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza”, where Israel’s genocidal three-year war has killed more than 74,000 people and left the vast majority of the territory in ruins.

The resulting destruction left the Jenin camp “nearly uninhabitable”, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Last month, a UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) report warned that the Israeli military’s actions at the three camps “appear to amount to collective punishment and raise concerns of ethnic cleansing”. Displaced Palestinians reported being told by Israeli officers that there would be no more refugee camps and that they should “all go to Jordan”.

Israeli forces killed at least 21 children during the operation, including a 10-year-old boy who was shot while waiting for his father and a two-year-old girl killed while having dinner with her family.

Analysts also pointed to the systematic destruction of vital infrastructure during the Hebron operation with the goal of making displacement permanent.

“Targeting the main infrastructure by the occupation army forces is a targeting of the life and stability of the Palestinian human being,” said Amr. He specified that targeting water wells “exceeds their direct material value, but rather relates to existence, stability and continuity”.

Amr also outlined the deep collaboration between the Israeli army and armed settler groups. “Settlers today in Hebron and other places have a militia consisting of more than 150,000 people heavily armed with modern automatic weapons and four-wheel drive vehicles, and they sometimes wear the occupation army uniform,” he said.

“The army closes the place, empties homes, demolishes them, and closes roads … while settlers continue their repeated attacks on the residents, released prisoners, and commercial interests.”

This ground-level violence is paired with administrative land grabs. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CRRC) said on Sunday the Israeli military had established 220 barriers across Hebron, severing Palestinian communities from their lands while maintaining connectivity for illegal settlements. The CRRC noted this is part of a broader network of new outposts designed to expand control over the spaces separating settlements and to besiege Palestinian expansions.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli army said in a statement that it would bar Palestinian workers from entering most areas of the West Bank through Monday and enforce a full closure of crossings into and out of the territory on Tuesday, the day of Israel’s parliamentary election.

Mayor al-Jabari accused Netanyahu and his hard-right government of exploiting the military operation to secure settler votes.

Amr echoed this sentiment. “The Palestinian pays this price as electoral propaganda for the right wing,” he said.

“They do not want Palestinians to remain in their places, but rather they propose a more advanced step, which is that they want to correct the history that allowed Palestinians to stay after the 1967 setback or even after the 1948 Nakba,” he added, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” to refer to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine nearly 80 years ago.