Inside Jenin, where life is hard for displaced Palestinians - and the pain keeps getting worse

Randa welcomes us into her home with a smile that is laced with desperate sadness. Once she lived in a large house - a reflection of her success as an entrepreneur.

Now, she has one room for her whole life. A woman who went to university, managed a supermarket, and cared for employees has now been brought down to the brink of despair.

We are in a building that used to house students, but has now been converted into a displacement centre for people expelled from Jenin by the Israeli military. There are around 175 people in this building, but, across this little district, there are thousands pining for the homes they left behind.

"Every day I cry for my home, and I cry for my shop," Randa tells me. "My shop has gone. My home has been turned into a road. Even if people were allowed to return, I have no home."

In the bed a few feet away from us, her husband lies, breathing softly. She has been caring for him for two decades as Parkinson's disease has rendered him immobile.

She was at home with him when the troops came, telling people they had to leave their homes in Jenin's decades-old refugee camp, set up amid the violence and war that followed the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

"Refugee camp" is, in truth, a misleading turn of phrase that conjures up ideas of tents, chaos and transience. Instead, the Jenin camp had become a fixed part of the town, a network of homes, businesses and schools where families had lived for generations, and where at least 13,000 people were living.

But at the start of 2025, the Israeli military started the process of clearing out the residents, citing long-standing links between the camp and both terrorist groups and organised crime.

It was an indiscriminate process. Everyone was cleared out, including Randa and her husband.

"When it happened, I wasn't sure what to do with him," she says. "People had to help me carry him out. Bullets were flying over me, there were airstrikes. It was horror.

"My message to the military is: 'What have I done wrong? What has my paralysed husband done wrong?' We should not be the ones forced to leave. At the end of the day, I want peace and safety."

The accommodation is sparse. A bed, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchenette. Randa has gathered together a tidy collection of spices, but she cannot get medicine for herself or her husband. All she has are eye drops.

I ask: "Nothing else? Not even painkillers?"

"Nothing," she says, her eyes flaring with a blend of anger, frustration, and deep weariness. She slaps her hands together - a sign of exasperation.

This is the reality of displacement, not just for Randa, but for tens of thousands of people who have been expelled from areas of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams over the past year and a half.

These are Palestinian towns, but the Israeli military has not just thrown people out; it has, in many cases, destroyed their homes. There is now a road running through the site of Randa's home.

The Israeli military has defended its action in Jenin by insisting that the threat of terror attacks has reduced, and that the crime rate in the northern West Bank has fallen.

But it is a fact that, according to the decades-old Oslo Accords, Israel has long since transferred civil and internal security control of Jenin to the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians are supposed to be in charge. In reality, the IDF has now taken control of much of the city, exposing the profound fault lines that are, if anything, now widening.

We meet other residents. Afiyeh Risqeel is suffering from cancer of the colon; her husband is blind and vulnerable.

"I could not walk," she tells us. "I could not make it out of the city on my own. I could barely carry myself, and I could not even carry the bag containing the few belongings that we had taken with us when we left. The children carried them for me."

"Life here is hard," she says, but her head is held upright, and her gaze is firm. She wants me to listen. "We are drained. The pain keeps getting worse."

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This is not a picture of politics, but of people. The Israeli military is unapologetic in believing that its actions are in the service of the greater good. The day after we visit, three people are killed by the IDF in the Jenin area, all of them claimed to be linked to terrorism.

But the likes of Randa and Afiyeh, stranded in the claustrophobic confines of this anonymous, dusty building, trying to care for their ailing husbands, are caught in the middle. Desperate to go home, unsure they ever will, fearful of what they might find.

(c) Sky News 2026: Inside Jenin, where life is hard for displaced Palestinians - and the pain keeps getting worse