Empty Hands and Fraying Safety Nets: Displaced Palestinians Struggle to Survive After Camp Evictions

Khadija Zbeidat and her grandchildren live in one room in the village of Dhinnaba after the Israeli military emptied out Tulkarem's refugee camp. In the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem, Hakim Mar’i spends his days lying on a single bed with his disfigured leg raised. The windows of Mar’i’s dilapidated apartment, his latest temporary shelter, are covered with old blankets. Unable to work, Mar’i has no money for electricity, so the blankets have to do, leaving his family in near darkness at night.

The apartment is situated just around the corner from mounds of rubble and gnarled iron structures marking one entrance to the now-emptied Tulkarem refugee camp. For Mar’i and other Palestinians, the camp was once considered a temporary home, but generations lived there, and now the physical structure that tied his family together over the years is gone.

Impoverished and facing mounting debts alongside another looming eviction, Hakim shared that he has considered taking his life several times over the past year and a half. He cannot afford treatment for a severe infection in his debilitating leg injury, which he sustained while working as a labourer inside Israel in 2019. Diabetes and other untreated conditions have compounded his suffering, but he lacks the funds for necessary medical care.

Sitting beside him less than a kilometre away from their former four-storey home, his mother, Salwa, wept when discussing the house built floor by floor following their initial displacement in 1948 from al-Khudayra, the Arabic name for Hadera, a city in Israel. After their removal, the Israeli military razed the Mar’i home to build a road traversing the cleared camp.

It has been more than 20 months since Israeli forces emptied the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps during a sweeping military operation in the northern West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians. Constantly renewed orders for a closed military zone continue to prevent their return. Since January 2025, Hakim’s family has moved four times, landing in a cramped apartment with four children under the age of 15. With rent unpaid and debts piling up at local shops for food bought on credit, Hakim laments his empty hands and lack of support.

The Mar’i family is among more than 33,000 Palestinians forcibly removed from the Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarem camps by Israeli forces in early 2025, marking the largest single episode of forced displacement in the West Bank since Israel’s occupation began in 1967, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). UN satellite imagery shows that 20 percent of all buildings across the three camps have been destroyed, with another 28 percent damaged. Roland Friedrich, director of West Bank affairs for UNRWA, noted that 85 percent of those displaced have no regular income and over 80 percent are renting—an unfamiliar expense for those who never paid for housing or utilities inside the camps.

While Hakim’s struggle unfolds near the camp, Khadija Zbeidat and her family face an imminent eviction on the outskirts of Tulkarem in the neighbourhood of Dhinnaba. A widow, Khadija shares a tiny, spartan room with nine family members, mostly children, along with a small bathroom and kitchen. The room was provided rent-free by a relative after they spent four months crammed into her daughter's house. Displaced in January 2025 from the Tulkarem camp’s Haret al-Nadi section, Khadija treasures memories of community and food, such as stuffed grape leaves and maamoul cookies made for Eid, which are now absent.

As the emergency stretches to nearly two years, informal safety nets provided by landlords, relatives, and shopkeepers are fraying. The owner of the property where Khadija’s family is staying recently demanded they leave, while Hakim’s family remains on the brink of eviction as well. With dwindling UNRWA funding and revoked work permits following the events of October 2023, displaced families find themselves trapped in deep economic precarity with an uncertain future.