By Monjed Jado – Drop Site News
HEBRON, Occupied West Bank—Baher Sultan returned to his home in Hebron’s Khallet al-Maghariba neighborhood on Monday, nine days after Israeli soldiers arrived at his front door and ordered his family to leave. Sultan, his wife, and his four children were among thousands of families forcibly displaced during a massive Israeli military operation in the city.
The house they returned to had been ransacked. Sultan said soldiers had occupied the home for several days, rifling through cupboards, breaking windows and door locks, and damaging household furniture and other belongings.
Despite the damage and the disruption to their lives, Sultan, 47, said his family was overjoyed simply to be back in their neighborhood. “We returned on the same day the army withdrew. I couldn’t wait,” he told Drop Site News.
The Israeli army’s 11-day assault on Hebron followed an October 23 attack by two Palestinian gunmen on a military checkpoint in the city that killed two Israeli soldiers before the two gunmen were shot dead. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the city soon afterwards and announced a major military operation. “The IDF will enter the neighborhoods from which the terrorists emerged, evacuate the residents, go house-to-house, and dismantle the terror infrastructure. We are prepared for an extensive operation in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using Israel’s name for the West Bank.
Sultan said the ordeal began on October 24, when Israeli soldiers raided his neighborhood and began knocking on residents’ doors.
“We had been frightened from the moment the occupation government made its announcement. We were watching what was happening, and when the army spread through the neighbourhood and the loudspeakers started, we became scared and confused,” he said. “Soldiers got out of their vehicles and began knocking on doors. When I opened the door, they asked who lived there and took my identity card. I told them, and then they informed me that I had to leave the house and take only a few essential belongings. Some of them were shouting [in Hebrew], and we couldn’t understand what they were saying, but we were frightened.”
The Israeli military sealed all the entrances to the city before moving in, displacing nearly 5,000 Palestinians, demolishing buildings, and disrupting schooling for some 80,000 students. Families in the Al-Jalda and Deir Bahha neighborhoods were all ordered to flee, while residents of other neighborhoods were subjected to a strict military cordon.
As the assault was under way, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) warned on October 27 that the Israeli military operation carried alarming echoes of the 2025 Israeli assault on three refugee camps in the northern West Bank that displaced over 32,000 Palestinians in what Human Rights Watch found amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The soldiers left Sultan and his family to make their way through the streets after ordering them to flee the neighborhood. They spent the first two days moving between relatives’ homes before his cousin offered them his apartment in the Sheikh neighbourhood, near Bab al-Zawiya in central Hebron, where they stayed for the next five days without knowing how long their displacement would last.
His children, out of school since the first day of the military operation, struggled to adjust to the unfamiliar environment.
“They don’t feel free to move around, and they feel shy and embarrassed whenever they do anything, like asking for food or going to the bathroom. They don’t talk about it, so as not to embarrass our cousins,” Sultan told Drop Site while the family was still displaced. “Their needs go beyond food and shelter. They need a space to move around, books and notebooks, and an education that allows them to carry on with a normal life.”
The Israeli army withdrew from the occupied neighborhoods at dawn on November 2, saying it had completed its operations after confiscating a grand total of four weapons. Families began returning to their damaged homes in Al-Jalda and Deir Bahha that same day, and schools, universities, and businesses began to reopen, Mayor Yousef al-Jabari told Al Jazeera.
Most homes in Khallet al-Maghariba sustained light to moderate damage, Sultan said, with broken windows among the most visible signs of the operation, adding that some residents believed some of the damage was caused by the deployment of Israeli snipers in the area.
His children have also returned to school. “They are happy now,” he said.
A City Ravaged by Occupation
Located in the southern West Bank, Hebron is the largest city in the territory with some 200,000 residents, and for decades has been one of the most tightly controlled by the Israeli occupation.
Unlike other cities in the West Bank that are ringed by Israeli settlements, usually on the surrounding hilltops, in Hebron Israeli settlements exist in the heart of the city, with armed Israeli settlers living in the midst of Palestinians residents. Also unlike other cities in the West Bank, Hebron did not receive the status of Area A under the Oslo Accords.
In 1997, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Israeli government signed the Hebron Protocol which split the city into two sections: H1, comprising 80% of the city that is nominally under Palestinian control, and H2, comprising 20% of the city that is under full Israeli military control, and includes the Old City and the historic Ibrahimi Mosque. Some 40,000 Palestinians live in H2 alongside several hundred settlers with a heavy Israeli military presence. The city also holds about 40 percent of the West Bank’s 89 main checkpoints and 11 percent of all 925 movement obstacles in the territory, according to the UN.
The Hebron Protocol was signed in the wake of the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, when Baruch Goldstein, an American-born settler, opened fire on Palestinians praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 worshippers.
Israel responded by partitioning the mosque and closing Shuhada Street, the Old City’s main commercial artery, to Palestinians. By 2007, 1,829 businesses in the city center had shut, about 440 of them by military order.
“Today those who rule Israel are followers of the man who carried out the massacre, and they are seeking to displace and expel us,” Sultan said, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, who kept a portrait of Goldstein on his living room wall for years before entering government.
For Sultan, who lived through the 1994 massacre, Israel’s latest operation was almost as bad. He says that back then at least the Israeli government still felt compelled to publicly condemn the violence, however nominally.
“Today, those committing the displacement, killing, and demolition are the government and the right-wing extremists in it,” he said.
For residents returning to their homes this week, the attack and their subsequent displacement are part of a much longer story.
Mass Expulsion
Abdul Shakour Mujahid said his was the first house in the neighborhood of Al-Jalda that was raided by the Israeli military.
“They told me I had an hour to take my most important things, and that I was only allowed to take simple things, clothes and some belongings,” he said.
The troops also confiscated his car, and what he was able to carry on foot was not enough for him, his wife, and their three children, the eldest of whom is 12.
Mujahid and his family moved into his father’s home in an adjacent neighborhood. In addition to relying on his father for food, he received an aid package of basic supplies and milk from the local relief committee. From a distance, he watched soldiers spread across the rooftops of Al-Jalda, where they used dozens of houses as sniper positions.
“The feeling is hard to describe. It is a new Nakba for us, to see your home before your eyes and not be able to reach it,” he said, invoking the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians use to describe their mass expulsion by Zionist forces in 1948. “It is the greatest crime and the greatest injustice. We have done nothing. What helps us endure is the embrace of family and relatives in the community.”
The Hebron Governorate Support and Relief Committee registered 537 affected families, comprising 3,361 people, including 232 infants, 1,193 children aged between two and 17, 326 elderly people, 147 pregnant or breastfeeding women, 32 people with disabilities, and 213 people with chronic illnesses, according to its head Sufian Al-Muhtaseb.
“Hebron’s communities refused to open shelters and declared they were ready to host displaced families [in their homes], and the invitations were not limited to relatives,” Al-Muhtaseb told Drop Site
Al-Muhtaseb said there were severe supply shortages, with the hardest requests the committee received being food and drink—and, above all, baby formula.
“The occupation did not allow residents to take their money from their homes, and they find it hard to ask the families they are staying with, even if they are relatives, and even those they went to may not be in a good financial situation,” he said.
A Ripple Effect
On October 29, Adalah, a legal center for Palestinian citizens of Israel, petitioned Israel’s High Court on behalf of the municipality and seven residents of Al-Jalda and Ein Deir Bahha.
The petition said troops forced hundreds of families from their homes late at night with little notice, barred their return indefinitely, and provided no concrete justification for an evacuation on that scale, which it argued amounted to forcible transfer and collective punishment under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
It also cited municipal figures showing that the closure had left about 1,200 tonnes of rubbish piling up in the city, as garbage trucks could not reach the sealed areas.
Hebron Mayor Yousef al-Jabari told Drop Site the municipality worked with partner organizations to provide aid to affected families.
“The municipality is preparing a survey to identify residents’ needs and priorities so that aid can be directed according to each family’s actual circumstances,” al-Jabari said before the Israeli withdrawal.
During the operation, Israeli forces demolished 15 homes and other structures and forced 327 shops to close, exacting a severe toll on the city’s economy—one of the most important in the West Bank.
The city accounts for about 40% of Palestinian industrial output in the West Bank and 30% of exports, and the closure of whole areas and restrictions on the movement of workers and goods halted factories, markets, and supply chains, while businesses and shops struggled to keep operating.
Adnan al-Natsheh, deputy head of the Hebron Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the direct losses from the closures “amount to between 10 million and 12 million shekels a day,” or about $3.2 million to $3.8 million, including about 1 million shekels in the dairy sector alone.
He warned that hundreds of industrial and commercial businesses have been affected, and said 13 facilities in the Farsh al-Hawa area had suffered vandalism, bulldozing, and demolition.
“The restrictions on workers and goods threaten entire production and supply chains across the West Bank.”
This piece was produced in collaboration with Egab.