“It was 5 in the morning, and my wife and children were still sleeping when I saw three bulldozers coming from a distance on the village’s main road,” said Raed Srour, 45. “When they approached, I could see that they were accompanied by several military jeeps, and I understood that it was an occupation demolition mission on its way to the village. I wondered where they might be headed. It didn’t occur to me that they were coming for my house.”

A father of four, Raed Srour didn’t know that on Monday morning, he and his family had just spent their last night in their home in the village of Ni’lin, west of Ramallah. Srour’s family had been living in that house for seven years after almost ten years of hard work, building it stone by stone.

Elsewhere in the West Bank on that same day, Israeli forces moved to demolish several more Palestinian homes: in Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, a seven-floor residential building was demolished, and in Anata, north of Jerusalem, 14 Palestinian properties received demolition orders. Later in the week, Israeli forces demolished a three-floor residential building in the village of Za’tara east of Bethlehem, in addition to several water wells in Tarqumia, west of Hebron.

The demolition of Palestinian homes is the other side of the coin of Israel’s seizure of Palestinian land for settlement expansion. Since 2023, home demolitions have displaced 7,392 Palestinians.

This demolition blitz has had the effect of clearing vast swathes of the West Bank of Palestinian physical presence, while limiting the urban expansion of Palestinians in their existing places of residence. In the past month alone, Israeli forces demolished 58 Palestinian properties — and 5,900 properties since October 7, 2023.

According to UN Data, in 2023, Israel demolished 1,178 Palestinian properties in the West Bank. That number skyrocketed to 1,768 in 2024, and since the beginning of 2025, Israel has already demolished 627 Palestinian properties.

According to Khalil Tafakji, one of the foremost........

© Truthout