Israeli forces to demolish more than 100 homes in Israeli-occupied West Bank, local governor says

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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli forces were preparing on Friday to carry out home demolitions across two northern urban refugee camps in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to the governor of one of the camps and Israeli military documents shared with The Associated Press by the United Nations.

Abdallah Kamil, the governor of Tulkarem, wrote on Facebook on Thursday that the military was preparing to demolish 116 homes across the Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps, two main targets of Israel’s raid into the northern West Bank.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it was implementing changes in the camps “to improve mobility for the soldiers” and prevent militancy. The military said that it had tried to minimize the number of buildings affected and invited the public to “contact the authorities to explore options for evacuating their belongings from buildings.”

Two demolition orders indicated that the buildings would be demolished in 24 hours, according to military documents shared by a U.N. official on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The news sent residents of the now evacuated Nur Shams and Tulkarem camps scrambling back to collect belongings before the destruction of their homes. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said there were reports of Israeli forces arresting and firing warning shots at Palestinians as they did so.

The Israeli military has been carrying out an operation in the West Bank over the past several months that displaced, at its height, approximately 40,000 Palestinians. It had emptied and largely destroyed several urban refugee camps in the northern West Bank, like Tulkarem and Nur Shams, that housed the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in previous wars. That’s the largest displacement in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Mideast war.

Israel has said that troops will stay in some camps for a year.