The old city of Nablus sits in a valley between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, its Ottoman-era stone lanes still carrying the faint scent of olive oil soap that has been pressed and traded here for centuries. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the West Bank — a commercial heart, a centre of Palestinian civic life, and, in the years since 2022, a recurring target of Israeli military operations that residents describe as both terrifying and economically catastrophic.
The Lions’ Den and the 2022–23 Military Campaign
In the late summer of 2022, a loose armed grouping calling itself the Lions’ Den (عرين الأسود, Arin al-Usud) emerged from Nablus’s old city. Composed largely of young men, many of them not affiliated with established factions, the group carried out shooting attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the northern West Bank. The Israeli military responded with a sustained campaign of targeted killings, arrest raids, and large-scale incursions into the city.
Between September 2022 and April 2023, Israeli forces conducted dozens of operations inside Nablus, frequently entering the old city in armoured vehicles, deploying drones, and imposing prolonged closures on surrounding roads. According to OCHA oPt reporting for that period, at least 49 Palestinians were killed in the Nablus governorate during the twelve months of 2022, making it one of the deadliest years in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. The UN agency documented repeated instances of live fire, including at close range, and noted that the majority of those killed were not engaged in hostilities at the time of their deaths — a characterisation the Israeli military disputed.
Among the most significant single incidents was the raid of 26 January 2023, in which Israeli special forces killed ten Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp — but in Nablus itself, the operation of 22 February 2023 drew international attention. Israeli forces entered the old city before dawn; by morning, eleven Palestinians had been killed, including Hussam Isleem, 72 years old, who according to Palestinian health officials and witnesses was shot while near his home. The Palestinian Authority condemned the operation. OCHA noted that the raid involved the use of armoured bulldozers to clear alleyways and that the old city was sealed for an extended period afterward.
Joseph’s Tomb: Nightly Intrusions and the Politics of Sacred Space
A separate but overlapping source of tension is Joseph’s Tomb, a shrine located at the eastern entrance to Nablus that holds religious significance for Jewish, Samaritan, Christian, and Muslim communities. Under the Oslo II Accord (1995), the site was designated Area A — Palestinian Authority civil and security control — but Israel retained the right to facilitate Jewish worship visits under coordination arrangements.
In practice, those arrangements have broken down repeatedly. Israeli forces conduct near-nightly escorted visits for Jewish worshippers, frequently without advance coordination with Palestinian Authority security services. B’Tselem and Palestinian official sources have documented that these visits routinely occur in the early hours of the morning, accompanied by large military contingents, and that Palestinian residents of adjacent neighbourhoods have been killed or injured during confrontations surrounding them. In April 2022, Raad Hazem, a 28-year-old Palestinian man from Nablus, carried out a shooting in Tel Aviv that killed three Israelis; the Israeli military’s subsequent operations in the city, including at and around Joseph’s Tomb, intensified in the weeks that followed.
Israeli settler groups have also conducted unauthorised visits to the site, bypassing even the military coordination process. Ir Amim and Peace Now have both reported on the role such uncoordinated incursions play in inflaming tensions across the northern West Bank.
Huwara: The Checkpoint and the February 2023 Pogrom
South of Nablus lies Huwara, a Palestinian town whose main street doubled for years as the principal route for settlers travelling between settlements and Israel. After the killing of two Israeli settlers near Huwara on 26 February 2023, hundreds of Israeli settlers descended on the town that same evening in an organised assault. They set fire to homes, vehicles, and businesses; one Palestinian man, Sameh Aqtash, was killed. Dozens of Palestinians were injured. The violence lasted for hours.
The Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din documented the events in detail. B’Tselem described the attack as a pogrom. Bezalel Smotrich, then serving as a minister in the Israeli government with authority over civilian affairs in the West Bank, stated publicly that the village of Huwara should be “wiped out” — a remark that drew formal censure from the United States government and condemnation from the European Union, though Smotrich remained in his post. The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process called the settler violence a “rampage.” Israeli army soldiers present during the attack were widely reported, including by Haaretz, to have largely stood aside.
For Nablus, Huwara is not an abstraction. The checkpoint at the town’s southern end has for years served as one of the primary bottlenecks controlling movement in and out of the city, affecting workers, students, patients, and traders on a daily basis.
An Economy Built on Soap — and Slowly Suffocated
Nablus has produced olive oil soap — saboun Nabulsi — for at least five hundred years. At the industry’s peak in the nineteenth century, the city hosted more than thirty soap factories; historians including Beshara Doumani, in his study Rediscovering Palestine, documented how Nabulsi merchants built regional trading networks stretching from Egypt to Syria. Several family-run factories still operate in the old city today, among them Tuqan and Shakaah, producing soap by methods largely unchanged since the Ottoman period.
But the broader economy tells a grimmer story. UNCTAD has repeatedly reported that the West Bank economy operates well below its potential due to Israeli movement restrictions, closure of external trade routes, and the fragmentation of Palestinian territory. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) recorded unemployment in Nablus governorate running in the high teens to low twenties (percentage) across the 2021–23 period. Each military incursion into the old city brings commerce to a halt — shops shuttered, supply chains severed, tourists and buyers absent. For the soap makers and the spice merchants and the families running stalls in the old city’s covered markets, the raids are not only a physical danger. They are an economic sentence.
The stone of the old city absorbs all of it: the smoke, the sound of armoured vehicles, the silence after a curfew lifts. The soap factories keep running, for now — a form of endurance that has outlasted many occupations. Whether it can outlast this one remains, for the people of Nablus, an open and daily question.
Sources
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Situation Reports and Protection of Civilians Reports, 2022–2023, ochaopt.org
- B’Tselem, incident documentation and reporting on Nablus and Huwara, 2022–2023, btselem.org
- Yesh Din, Documentation of the Huwara settler attack, February 2023, yesh-din.org
- Ir Amim, reporting on Joseph’s Tomb and settler activity in the northern West Bank, ir-amim.org.il
- Peace Now, settlement and settler incursion reporting, peacenow.org.il
- UNCTAD, Report on UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People, 2022, unctad.org
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), labour force surveys 2021–2023, pcbs.gov.ps
- Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (University of California Press, 1995)
- Oslo II Interim Agreement, Annex I and III, 1995 (on Area A designations and Joseph’s Tomb arrangements)
- Haaretz, reporting on Huwara settler violence and military conduct, February–March 2023
