Tens of thousands of Palestinians forced to escape on the west coast while the Israeli military operation deepens

The author and on foot, through muddy olives and lines of sniper, tens of thousands of Palestinians in recent weeks have escaped Israeli military operations through the northern western coast-leaning shift on the occupied territory of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

After announcing a widespread interruption against the west coastal charters-just two days after his truce with Hamas in Gazi-Israeli forces, they descended in the slope of the city of Jenin, because they have tens of times from October 7 under the leadership of Hamas. , 2023, an attack on Israel.

But unlike past surgeries, Israeli forces then pushed deeper and stronger in several other nearby cities, including Tulkarm, Far’a and Nur Shams, scattering families and stirring bitter memories of the 1948 war.

During this war, 700,000 Palestinians escaped or were forced from their homes in the present Israel. That Nakba, as the Palestinians call it, using the Arabic word for a “disaster”, encouraged the crowded cities of the West Coast now under the attack and still known as refugee camps.

“This is our Nakba,” said Abed Sabagh, 53, who put his seven children in his car on February 9, while the sound bombs rushed to the Nur Shams camp, where he was born to parents who fled the 1948 war.

‘This is unprecedented’: UN -O’s clerk

Humanitarian officials say they have not seen such displacement on the west coast since the war of 1967, when Israel took over the territory west of the Jordan River, along with East Jerusalem and Gaza belt, moving another 300,000 Palestinians.

“This is unprecedented. When you add to the destruction of infrastructure, we reach the point where the campsites become uninhabited,” Roland Friedrich, director of the West Coast for the UNWA, UN -Palestinian Refugee Agency. More than 40,100 Palestinians have escaped from their homes in current military operation, according to the Agency.

Experts say the Israeli tactic on the west coast is almost unable to distinguish from those distributed in Gaza. Already US President Donald Trump Proposal for mass transfer of Palestinians from Gaza He painted the far right Israel to renew the calls for the west coast annexation.

“The idea of” cleaning “of the Palestinian country is more popular today than ever before,” said Yagil Levy, head of the Institute for Studying Civilian Relations at the British Open University.

The Israeli army denies issuing an evacuation order on the west coast. The troops said they were providing passages for those who wanted to leave themselves.

7 minutes to leave home

Over a dozen displaced Palestinians in the last week said they had not escaped their homes for fear, but at the behest of Israeli security forces. Journalists from the Associated Press at the Nur Shams camp also heard Israeli soldiers shouting through the megaphone mosques, ordering people to leave.

Some displaced families said that the soldiers were decent, knocking on the door and assured them that they could return when the army left. Others said that they were ruthless, unpacked rooms, waved their rifles and rushed in residents from their homes despite pleas for more time.

“I jerked them, asking them,” Why do you want me to leave the house? My baby is up, just let me get my child, “” Ayat Abdullah, for 30 years, recalled from a shelter for displaced people in a village in the village of Kafr al-Labd. “They gave us seven minutes. I brought my children, thank God. Nothing else.”

Formed to go in his own way, Abdullah went for 10 kilometers on a path that only shone with her phone as she turned the earth into the mud. She said she had tightened her children firmly, holding herself at the possible sniper who had killed a 23-year-old pregnant woman just hours earlier, February 9th.

Her five -year -old son, Nidal, interrupted her story, dealing with her lips together to make a loud sound of sound.

“You’re right, my love,” she replied. “It’s a sound that made the drones when we left home.”

In the nearby city of Anabta, the volunteers moved and left the mosques and government buildings that became improvised shelters – delivering donated blankets, serving bitter coffee, distributing cooked eggs for breakfast and hitting rice and chicken for dinner.

When the invasion began on February 2, Israeli bulldozers broke underground pipes. The taps are dry. Sewage sewage. Internet service is off. Schools closed. Food supply decreased. The explosions echoed.

The Israeli army described its current campaign as a key contraroism to prevent attacks like October 7 and said that the steps were taken to alleviate the impact on civilians.

A scary return

The first thing Doha Abu Dgheish noticed in connection with the five -pole home of her family for 10 days after the Israeli troops forced them to leave, she said, was a scent.

Daring inside as the Israeli troops withdrew from the farm camp, she found rotten foods and toilets accumulated by excretion. Pets for pets disappeared from their cages. The pages of the Qur’an were lined with graphic drawings. The Israeli forces obviously used explosives to blow all the doors from their hinges, although none were locked.

Rama, her 11-year-old daughter with Down Syndrome, screamed when she found a doll skirt torn and her face covered with more graphic drawings.

Associated Press journalists visited the Abu DGHeish home on February 12, hours after their return.

Almost two ten Palestinians interviewed in four refugee camps on the West Coast this month described that the units of the army that took over the civil homes used as dormitories, warehouses or views points. The Abu Dgheish family accused Israeli soldiers of vandalizing their home, as well as more families in Farm.

The Israeli army blamed the militants for installation in civilian infrastructure. Soldiers can “demand that they act from civilian homes at different periods,” it is stated, adding that the destruction of civil assets was a violation of military rules and not in accordance with its values.

It said “any exceptional incidents that cause concern about deviations from these orders” thoroughly resolved “without detail.

For Abu Dgheish, the mess was an emblematic emotional blow to their return. No one knows when they will have to escape again.

“It’s like they want to feel we’re never sure,” she said. “Not to have control.”