Waleed Lahlouh was 73, with a shock of white hair that marked his age, when Israeli soldiers shot him dead on a sunny February morning outside his home in Jenin refugee camp. Relatives said he was killed while trying to collect some winter clothes for his family.
He had fled with his children and grandchildren a week earlier when Israeli troops moved into the camp and ordered residents out within an hour. They scrambled to gather documents, valuables and phones, and had little time to pack clothes.
“He went to get some things we need, but he was shot before he even got into the house,” said his daughter Samia Lahlouh, 45. “The grandchildren ask us: ‘Grandpa was old, and didn’t do anything bad, why did they want to kill him?” She didn’t have an answer.
The Lahlouhs are among 40,000 people forced out of their homes in refugee camps across the occupied West Bank this year, the largest displacement since Israel seized the territory in 1967.
The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that “evacuated” Palestinians would not be able to go back home this year, and sent three tanks to Jenin.
Palestinians who have lost homes and loved ones over the past month have described Jenin as a “little Gaza” because of the scale of destruction, death and displacement.
The same comparison is made inside Israel, with some cabinet members demanding the use of military tactics from Gaza, as domestic critics warn against the “Gazafication” of the West Bank.
The far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Palestinian cities there to be emptied and destroyed, as a pre-emptive strike to prevent attacks on Jewish settlers. “Nablus and Jenin need to look like Jabaliya,” he said in January, referencing one of the worst-hit areas of Gaza.
At least seven Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces since the operation began in January, including a two-year-old girl shot dead in her home just outside Jenin, the UN said. Other victims include a heavily pregnant woman shot at a checkpoint.
Lahlouh was a gentle, playful taxi driver born and raised in Jenin camp, who for decades poured his energy and money into educating his eight daughters, Samia said. All of them went to university, two became headteachers and one completed a doctorate.
He would visit their homes every Friday, bringing a plate of freshly made hummus and other local favourites for breakfast. Then he would gather his grandchildren round for reading and spelling contests, with prizes for the winners, focused as always on education.
The day he was killed, Lahlouh got up early and left before anyone was awake. The family is crowded into the home of a relative in a village outside Jenin, separated from the camp by a few small rolling hills, but close enough that drones and planes buzz constantly overhead.
His son, Sami, 40, rang to check in with him. “He told me: ‘I’m having coffee with my sister, then I’m going to the camp.’ I told him not to go, the [Israeli] army are there.”
Lahlouh told Sami there was a break in the fighting so he wanted to collect a few warm things for everyone and check on the house.
He had lived through multiple raids on Jenin camp, and fled his home once before, during the second intifada. He had seen neighbours killed and buildings razed by Israeli troops, and watched the death toll from Israeli attacks in Gaza climb toward 50,000.
So he was wary of the Israeli military. But he didn’t believe soldiers would open fire on an old, unarmed man in broad daylight. “He thought it would be safe,” Samia said.
A neighbour who worked as a medic called the family later that morning to break the news that Lahlouh had been picked up, badly injured. By the time the family reached the hospital, he was dead.
“He was in front of the house, the paramedic told us. He never made it inside,” said Sami. “He so much wanted to go back home.” There was just one shot, medics told the family, which went through his abdomen.
Israeli forces barred the family from burying him that day, which is required by Muslim tradition, and blocked all but one relative from attending. Sami – Lahlouh’s only son – was ordered to do a brief, solitary interment at 6.30am, driving from the hospital to the cemetery along a route fixed by Israeli forces.
“Were were given one hour for the journey and burial; they asked us to leave very fast,” he said. “They prevented his daughters, his sisters, his other relatives from coming to bury him. We were not granted this basic right.”
The Israeli military said forces had killed Lahloul when they “carried out the standard suspect arrest procedure”. They fired warning shots at “a suspect” moving towards troops, then aimed at Lahloul, a spokesperson said.
The military permitted only “a limited burial ceremony to take place under IDF escort and security” because the graveyard was an active combat zone, they said.
Operation Iron Wall was announced on 21 January by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “to defeat terrorism in Jenin”, a new objective in the multifront war Israel has been fighting in Gaza and across the region, including in Lebanon.
The last major military operation across the West Bank was during the second intifada, more than two decades ago, when Israeli forces moved in to crush a coordinated uprising across the occupied territories and in a series of suicide attacks inside Israel.
Jenin camp is a dense urban area settled by families expelled from homes in what is now northern Israel during the war surrounding the state’s creation in 1948. It has long been a centre of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and has been repeatedly targeted by Israel.
In 2002, after a 10-day operation in Jenin camp, a UN envoy described the situation as “horrific beyond belief”.
Operation Iron Wall has already lasted longer than that campaign and displaced residents on a scale not seen since 1967. At least 44 Palestinians have been killed, including seven children, since it began.
Many of those killed were unarmed and posed no imminent threat, the UN said, describing their deaths as part of a “continuously increasing number of apparently unlawful killings documented by the UN Human Rights Office”.
The statement condemned the operation and called for an “immediate halt to this alarming wave of violence and mass displacement”.
The Israeli military had loosened their rules of engagement, with troops allowed to shoot to kill anyone “messing with the ground”, Haaretz newspaper reported. The Israeli military denied changing open fire rules.
Homes in Jenin have also been demolished in mass detonations, a new tactic amplifying an old strategy. In 2002 much of the camp was razed, and the army has used armoured bulldozers and other military vehicles to destroy homes, but they move at a slower pace.
Hassan Amin, 50, had a home at the edge of one demolition zone. Now he shares a small apartment with 20 relatives in a village just outside Jenin.
Like the Lahlouhs, Amin said they were ordered to leave by loudspeakers on drones, and told which route to follow out of the camp. “We left against our will,” he said. “They gave us a certain route to follow, with checkpoints. As we walked there were drones over our head. Children, women and the elderly were all terrified.”
The exodus on foot felt terrifyingly similar to all the reports about forced evacuations inside Gaza, Amin said, and what followed seemed copied from there, too.
Katz said he had ordered Israeli forces “not to allow residents to return” in the coming year.
The Israeli military said: “The IDF does not evacuate the population in [the West Bank]. However, the IDF has allowed local residents who wish to distance themselves from combat areas to leave safely through designated crossings secured by the forces.”
Barred from returning home, Amin spends his days alternating between immediate worries about how to feed his family and longer-term fears they will never go home.
His day-rate work has dried up, after the operation effectively shut down Jenin. Israeli military convoys have turned even the outskirts into a ghost town, with shops shuttered and usually crowded streets almost empty of cars.
Schools are not opening, so his frightened and anxious children are at home all day, slipping behind on education.
With the camp off-limits, he has spent long hours looking through Israeli military videos from Jenin for any clues as to whether their home survived. He spotted it, damaged and surrounded by rubble, briefly captured as a soldier walks past.
“This is all we saw: part of our home is destroyed,” he said, freezing the frame on the video for a second. “We don’t know what happened.”
