Soldiers and columns of Israeli army vehicles had only just withdrawn from Tulkarem, in the north of the occupied West Bank. In the Nur Shams refugee camp to the east of the city, everyone was busy in the still-smoldering ruins. Armed with a small screwdriver, Hussein Moussa Alajma balanced on the blackened rubble that replaced the small house where his telephone store was located on the first floor, and the apartment on the second floor where his disabled 90-year-old father had lived. The building, which overlooked a small square, was destroyed, either set on fire or burnt down during the operation. He was trying to salvage what he could, painstakingly unscrewing an iron structure to free it from the broken concrete uprights. It could always be used again.

At the end of a rainy and muddy January, Israeli soldiers – 1,000 according to local sources – were deployed for a new operation lasting almost three days. There was fighting and shooting in the two Tulkarem refugee camps. Along with Jenin and Nablus, these are the three main towns where operations are constantly carried out to arrest or eliminate fighters from underground armed groups and destroy weapons stockpiles or explosives laboratories, with violence and blunders as a result. Far from Gaza, another war is being waged here, of a more complex nature, dormant but permanent.

Since the beginning of the war triggered by the Hamas attack on October 7, similar operations have been carried out almost daily in many parts of the West Bank. There have been 23 raids in Jenin alone. In Tulkarem, it's an average of one a week. On January 19, nine people were killed and two dozen houses bulldozed. In Nur Shams, the soldiers only stayed a few hours, but a typhoon seemed to have swept through the alleyways.

'Victims of this long colonial history'

"Everything happened so fast. We were inside, we couldn't understand what was happening. The fire started, and I managed to carry my father on my back to get him out of the flames. By the time we had taken refuge in another house, a bulldozer came and finished destroying the house," said Alajma. Five other buildings were destroyed within a radius of 50 meters. Teenagers scampered through the ruins, trying to lend a hand. Men worked in chains to clear away sections of wall. An entire dislocated electrical network was pulled toward a van, like a giant insect corpse.

Sitting on a plastic chair in what used to be his home, Mohammed Chahada slowly smoked a cigarette below the long gash that had ripped open the block. Contemplating the disaster calmly, he explained: "It's a house I built little by little, over 30 years. My whole life vanished this morning, but what you're seeing here is the consequence of a much older story." He took a long puff, blew out powerful jets of smoke and then launched into a lesson on the history of Palestinian refugee camps: "I'm originally from Haifa. I was driven out of there [in 1948, during the Nakba, after the creation of Israel] so that today other people could come to live in this land that was ours, on the ruins of our very homes, those of our ancestors. We are exiles, uprooted by force. This was only possible because the Western countries, the colonial powers, France and the United Kingdom, were against us. Today, we are the victims of this long colonial history that began over a hundred years ago. That's what's important."

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