Tulkarem, Palestinian Territories - In the West Bank city of Tulkarem, the landscape has been transformed after Israeli army bulldozers ploughed through its two refugee camps in what the military called a hunt for Palestinian militants.

The army gave thousands of displaced residents just a few hours to retrieve belongings from their homes before demolishing buildings and clearing wide avenues through the rubble.

Now residents fear the clearances will erase not just buildings, but their own status as refugees from lands inhabited by generations of their ancestors in what is now Israel.

The “right of return” to those lands, claimed by Palestinian refugees ever since the creation of Israel in 1948, remains one of the thorniest issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The army said it would demolish 104 more buildings in the Tulkarem camp this week in the latest stage of an operation that it launched in January during a truce in the Gaza war, billing it as an intensive crackdown on several camps that are strongholds of Palestinian armed groups fighting against Israel.

“We came back to the camp and found our house demolished. No one informed us, no one told us anything,” said Mr Abd al-Rahman Ajaj, 62, who had been hoping to collect his belongings on July 2.

Born in Tulkarem camp after his parents fled what is now the Israeli city of Netanya, about 12km to the west, Mr Ajaj said he had not foreseen the scale of the Israeli operation.

It began with a raid on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, a longtime stronghold of Palestinian militants, and quickly spread to other cities, including Tulkarem, displacing at least 40,000 people, according to United Nations figures.

Vacating the camp after a warning of a raid, “we would usually come back two or three days later”, Mr Ajaj told AFP.

Now left without a house, he echoed the sentiments of Palestinians of his parents’ generation, who thought their own displacement in 1948 would also be temporary....