In a quiet corner of the Al-Amari refugee camp , Ahmad al-Salhi, 84, sits surrounded by his five sons, four daughters and 28 grandchildren. When asked about the beginning, the day his family left their home and their village after the Nakba in 1948, his mind goes to Lod, to the moment he was eight years old.
Every year on 15 May, Palestinians mark the Nakba – "catastrophe" in English – when in 1948 over 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel.
"I don't remember many details," he says, then pauses. "But I don't forget my mother. She was carrying my brother Youssef, he was four, and holding my hand, and we walked with my father out of the house."
That house, he says, "was a very beautiful stone house, with a small orchard in front." He remembers little else from that day: a bag of clothes, a move from place to place, from Lod to the village of Beit Nuba, before his family eventually settled in the camp.
But now, 78 years later, the fear of being moved again has settled into Al-Amari like damp in the walls.
Since January 2025, Israeli forces have carried out a sweeping military operation across northern West Bank camps, in what UN officials described as the largest forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.
Around 40,000 people were evacuated. In Jenin, Tulkarem and Nour Shams alone, 86 buildings containing 258 housing units were demolished. Another 104 buildings and 400 units followed.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz later directed the military to occupy the evacuated camps and prevent residents from returning, permanently.
For the families who left, there was no clean departure. People moved between relatives' homes, rented rooms in nearby cities, and slept in schools and community centres.
Entire neighbourhoods that had taken decades to build — cramped and layered and alive — were reduced to rubble in days.
Those who watched from a distance, in camps like Al-Amari, recognised the rhythm: the military cordon, the order to leave, the promise that it was temporary, the demolition that made temporary permanent.
In the first week of May 2026, the UN confirmed that Israeli demolition operations in the West Bank had displaced 42 Palestinians in those days alone, among them 24 children. Echoes of 1948 in today's streets Al-Amari, south of al-Bireh near Ramallah, has not faced that scale of operation. But it has not been untouched.
Israeli forces have raided the camp multiple times in recent months; in one operation, a child and a young man were shot with live ammunition.
"Every night I hear a jeep," says Abu Yasser, a man in his sixties who repairs electrical appliances near the camp. "And I think: is it our turn today? Everyone here knows what happened in Jenin could happen to us. That fear exists, even if we don't talk about it much."
Umm Aboud, 77, was born in this camp, or before it was called a camp, when the tents were still white, and people were saying they would return soon.
She grew up on her grandmother's stories about their village of Tafit in Jaffa: a house with a blue door, a well in the courtyard, and an almond tree that bloomed every spring.
"My grandmother used to say: the day we left, no one believed we weren't coming back," she says. "They kept saying tomorrow, tomorrow. And tomorrow kept leaving without arriving."
She lived through 1967, when the West Bank fell under Israeli military control, and a new chapter opened in the same story.
"The Naksa frightened us. We said: Now there are others coming to make us leave. But we didn't leave." She remembers soldiers on the roads, markets shut, children running home. "Every day we thanked God we were still here."
She raised seven children inside the camp. She told them all to memorise the name of the village their grandfather came from. "I said: this is your real name, this is the original home. The camp is not your home. The camp is a stop."
When she heard that homes in Tulkarem camp had been demolished, the connection was immediate. "I remembered how they told our people in Lod: go, but you will come back. They didn't come back."
She does not cry when she speaks of this. "My children ask me, 'Why don't you cry, Mama?' I tell them, 'Even the tears got tired.'" A future measured in past promises Al-Amari was established in 1949, built by the International Red Cross to shelter Palestinians displaced during the Nakba, from Lod, Jaffa, Ramla, and villages whose names were removed from maps but not from memory.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) took over management in 1950. By 1957, the tents had given way to concrete walls.
Today, approximately 12,000 people live on 96 dunams, making it one of the most densely populated areas in the West Bank.
The houses press against each other; the alleys narrow to an arm's width. That density is not incidental; it is what 75 years of containment looks like.
Saeed, in his mid-twenties, was born in the camp as his father was, and his grandfather before him.
"We're not refugees looking for sympathy," he says. "We're people with land and houses and origins. But we're locked inside walls we can't see."
The older generation and the younger one hold the fear differently, but they hold the same fear.
The elderly recognise the pattern, the language of temporary measures, the assurances of return that never came.
The young have known nothing but this place and cannot imagine being stripped of it.
Umm Aboud has never seen Jaffa with her own eyes. Neither have her children. But they know the name of the neighbourhood, the street, and the neighbours.
"This isn't a memory," she says. "This is identity."
For more than 78 years, the people of Al-Amari have been told their situation is temporary.
Temporary became tents, tents became concrete, and concrete became generations.
Now, as camps are emptied and demolished by military force elsewhere in the West Bank, that supposed temporality looks less like a waiting room and more like a trap, not a path toward return, but toward a deeper displacement.
Umm Aboud still makes coffee every morning. Her grandchildren still come through the door.
But the fear runs beneath the quiet of daily life: that one day she will have to say to them what her grandmother once said to her.
"Take what you can carry. They say we'll come back." Aseel Mafarjeh is a West Bank-focused journalist, focusing on stories that speak of the challenges and creativity of youth in Palestine This article is published in collaboration with Egab