Dear Friends,

Just outside the city of Bethlehem lies the Aida Refugee Camp, whose original residents were forced from their homes in 1947-48. The residents were joined by a new group of refugees in 1967. I visited Aida Camp twice in February of this year (2026). The prominent key at the entrance symbolizes the right of descendants to return to the places from which their families were displaced.

At its creation in 1950, Aida Refugee Camp housed about 1,100 refugees in 94 fabric tents that were provided by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), the UN agency responsible for serving Palestinian refugees. The man pictured in the photo above, Munther Amira, a current resident, was born in one of those tents. Munther is now the head of the administrative board of the Aida Youth Center, a vibrant hub in the community that was created in 1968 to serve and empower the camp’s children and youth.

In 1956, UNRWA replaced the original tents with cinder block housing units. As the population grew, families expanded their units in the only direction in which space was available - up - so that the camp is now comprised of densely packed multistory buildings. In these overcrowded conditions, residents experience lack of infrastructure including water and electricity shortages, limited access to health services, high unemployment and poverty rates, and lack of access to green spaces and recreational facilities. The camp is surrounded on three sides by Israel’s separation wall.

ABOUT RETURN

I’m often asked, “why don’t Palestinian refugees accept that they lost the war, and let go of claims to return? Isn’t that what happens in other places?”

Some refugees do make that choice. But that is not the choice of Palestinians living in Aida Camp, elsewhere in the West Bank, or Gaza. And according to international law, all refugees have the right to return to their home country.

Israel has argued that the Palestinian right of return would mean that Israel would no longer maintain a Jewish majority. This is the same reasoning that led to the forcible displacement of the population and the creation of so many refugees in the first place.

But international law is clear. The 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s Resolution 194 (passed in 1948), and the UN’s Resolution 3236 (adopted in 1974), “Reaffirms the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return”. Amnesty International (2001) and Human Rights Watch (2000) also attest to the right of return for Palestinians.

There is another kind of return as well: Israel has had, since 1950, what it calls the Law of Return, which gives every Jew in the world - along with their spouse, children, and grandchildren - the right to Israeli citizenship. Here, the idea of return is based on 2000 year old claims. One has to wonder… if Jews didn’t give up the idea of returning to the Holy Land for 2000 years, why do they think Palestinians will give up their wish - and their legal right - to return to their lands?

Aida Camp is the site of frequent violence from Israeli soldiers. A 2018 study by the Human Rights Center of UC Berkeley found that Aida Camp is the most teargassed community in the world: at the time, 100% of Aida’s residents had been exposed to teargas, over 83% of them inside their own home. (Take a moment to think about that.)

Munther Amira, the man born in a tent in the early days of the camp, is a calm, thoughtful guy. He described some of the conditions in the camp, and noted that the Israeli occupation controls most everything: water, electricity, signals for cell phones, movement in and out. He said, “The occupation is in every single part of our life. It’s not just the shooting.”

Munther is committed to nonviolence. “Israel has the strongest, most violent military machine in the world, and what happened in Gaza proves that they are waiting for any kind of violence to beat you and to kill you and to throw you from here.”

Following October 7, Munther was arrested, along with more than fifty other people from the camp, including men and women ranging in age from 15 to 55. In the arrests, heavily armed Israeli soldiers stormed the camp before dawn, damaged homes, and threw tear gas. Munther, like the others arrested from the camp and like more than 3,000 other Palestinians currently in Israeli prisons, was held under the Israeli policy of administrative detention, which allows Israel to jail Palestinians indefinitely (in six-month intervals) without charges or trial. Munther was threatened recently that he would be arrested again if he continues his (non-violent) advocacy.

Whispering softly, Munther said he would not tell me about the torture he endured in an Israeli prison: “I will not compare those four months [in Israeli detention] with two centuries in any other prison in the world. Yes, we are paying a hard price just to say, ‘I am a Palestinian. I want this occupation to end.’ The West Bank is a place of suffering. The easiest part of our life is to be killed.”

At the end of our conversation, Munther gazed toward the settlement in the distance and said, “what is happening now in Gaza happened with our families in 1948. But then, there were no media that would cover and document what was happening. And it’s not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank too.”

Munther ended our conversation with this: “Our strength, it’s our story - the truth, our right to live. The occupation has to be ended, but it will not be easy. We, the Palestinian people, we cannot do it alone. It’s not just our task as Palestinians - it is also your task to end this occupation.”

Salaam,

Nancy

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