The international community does not object to permanent forced displacement

Mere days after Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered a detailed plan for the return of over 33,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced by Israeli forces from Tulkarem, Jenin and Nur al-Shams refugee camps, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the forced displacement is permanent. 

The difference between the occupied West Bank and Gaza is starting to diminish. In both areas, Palestinians have been declared terrorists. Israel subjected Gaza to genocide which displaced almost the entire remaining population, while enhancing forced displacement tactics, already normalised, in the occupied West Bank. In both areas, a permanent Israeli military presence became a new reality. 

In another move that reeks of permanence, the Israeli military started building a base in Jenin, under the pretext of security concerns prior to the return of the refugees. As happened in Gaza, the base was declared to be temporary.

However, not allowing refugees to return indicates a permanent colonial presence, as happened with Israel’s military occupation of Gaza which is still expanding over the remaining territory. Soon there will be little by which to differentiate between the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Forced displacement, erroneously normalised since the 1948 Nakba, is fast becoming the common feature in Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. According to a joint report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot, Israel farm outposts had occupied approximately 18 per cent of land in the occupied West Bank by December 2025. 

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For the international community, the war crime of forced transfer stops with the statistics. As long as there is a number to refer to, the international community feels no obligation to proceed beyond the usual statements of condemnation which, one can argue, have also facilitated Israel’s colonial expansion. Israel steals land and Palestinians are handed tokens of inadequate compensation through humanitarian aid. Anything more risks upsetting Israel’s colonial gains in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. 

Despite the ongoing reality for Palestinians, it is the statistics and subsequent brief exposure in the media that communicates the war crime to the world. Yet the international community mostly fails to speak of forced displacement as a war crime. Instead, the rhetoric is focused on how best to provide aid, or how Israel will allow aid to reach the Palestinian refugees. As Israel expands its presence through the Yellow Line in Gaza, for example, the Yellow Line garners far more attention than the forced displacement itself. The more Palestinians are pushed out, the more invisible they become. If the international community was truly focused on international law, Palestinian refugees would have achieved permanent prominence in their displacement. 

Israel is leaving no space for pretence anymore, and it has decades of impunity at its service. Forced displacement dates back to the 1948 Nakba, when the international community normalised ethnic cleansing to allow the Zionist colonial project to declare itself a state on stolen Palestinian land.

As Netanyahu adamantly insists that forcibly displaced Palestinians will not be allowed to return, the international community’s passive silence is the only thing that reverberates louder than Israel’s belligerence.

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