Fatima Tawfeeq, 63, has lived through numerous Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank. She witnessed Israel’s takeover of the Palestinian territory in 1967 and lived through Israel’s crackdown during the first and second intifadas, the fierce Palestinian uprisings against Israeli control.

But this is the first time she’s had to flee her home in Nur Shams. She says Israeli forces expelled her from it earlier this month and converted it into a military barracks.

Tawfeeq and her family are among roughly 40,000 Palestinians who’ve been displaced from their homes since Israel launched an expanded military campaign in the West Bank in late January, almost immediately after the Gaza ceasefire began.

The Israeli military says it is targeting Palestinian militant groups who have mounted attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, but Palestinians and human rights groups say the expanded assault is increasingly indiscriminate – killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in a manner that is consistent with collective punishment.

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz has said the current military operation could last until the end of the year and that displaced civilians will not be allowed to return to their homes until the operation is complete.

“I have instructed the IDF to prepare for a prolonged stay in the camps that have been cleared for the coming year – and not to allow residents to return and terrorism to grow again,” Katz said on Sunday.

‘Where are we supposed to go?’

Tawfeeq, her husband and several of her grandchildren are living alongside other families, among piled up bedrolls and blankets that have been strung up to create family “rooms.” There is no central heating, and the inside of the concrete building they share feels even colder than outside.

Her 11-year-old grandson Mahmoud passes the time by jumping from a stage in the hall next to their makeshift quarters onto the bedrolls below.

But he misses home and recalled the moment Israeli forces ordered his family and their neighbors to leave their homes at around 2:30 a.m. earlier this month.

“The Israeli military came and started calling on the loudspeakers,” he said. “So everyone started to gather their belongings and started leaving.”

Mahmoud’s mother rushed him out of the house.

“I didn’t have time to pack anything,” he said. “I didn’t take anything with me. I left with the clothes I am wearing today.”

As Mahmoud recounts the events of that night, his 9-year-old sister Rou’ya begins to tear up. Amid the trauma of their displacement, their mother has had to leave them to take their younger brother to the hospital.

“I want mama,” Rou’ya says, crying.

Rou’ya explains that she was terrified of the military. She had never seen Israeli soldiers up close before and feared that the soldiers would take their home and give it to Israeli settlers.

Their grandmother, forced from her own home, worries what a year-long operation will mean for her and her family, becoming emotional as she thinks of being separated from her other grandchildren.

“Eventually, they will hold wedding parties and we will need to leave. Where are we supposed to go?” Tawfeeq asked. “An entire year is difficult.”

The prospect of prolonged displacement is also straining the resources of communities like Kafr al-Labad that have taken in some of those forced from their homes.

“We are trying to provide for these needs with the support of local families and benefactors, but frankly, this issue is a significant burden and challenge,” Amin Barghoush, a municipal representative of Kafr al-Labad, said.

He said support from the Palestinian Authority, which partially controls the West Bank, has been minimal and his community’s goodwill is being stretched amid the prospect of a prolonged crisis.

“Tulkarem Governorate has become one of the most affected areas. We might have one of the highest refugee populations in the country,” he said. “What we are witnessing is comprehensive destruction, an economic blockade and the devastation of infrastructure in the refugee camps.”

Widespread destruction

The road into the Nur Shams camp, established to house Palestinian refugees in 1952, is now unrecognizable. The pavement has been dug up by the Israeli military’s D-9 bulldozers – mounds of asphalt and dirt piled up on the sides of roads, often pouring into shops and homes. Sewage seeps into the muddy streets.

Inside the camp, the destruction is even more stark. Some residential buildings have been demolished; a hole is punched into the side of a mosque; chunks of broken concrete now bare the inside of someone’s home to the outside world.

In sections of the camp – and the same can be said of Jenin and Tulkarem camps – the destruction is reminiscent of what the Israeli military has wrought on the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, Israel’s military operations in the West Bank are increasingly resembling those in Gaza. Drone strikes and airstrikes are now regularly carried out here where they were once a rarity. And for the first time in more than two decades, the Israeli military this week deployed tanks to the West Bank.

In Jenin camp, the Israeli military has conducted dozens of controlled explosions, destroying buildings where it says its troops located explosives and other “terrorist infrastructure.” It is a claim Jenin’s mayor Mohammad Jarrar disputes, saying many were residential buildings where dozens of families lived.

Israeli forces have killed 66 people in the West Bank since the start of the latest operation on January 21, according to figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and local officials say the majority of those killed have been civilians.

The Israeli military says it is targeting militants and said Friday that it has killed “70 terrorists” since the beginning of the operation.

The overall impact of the Israeli operation on civilians, though, is indisputable.

Inside the chilly wedding hall, Rou’ya longs for the toys she would arrange in her room before reading them stories. Mahmoud says he craves the privacy of his own bedroom. They both want to go home.

“Even if they demolish our house, we will rebuild it,” Mahmoud said. “The camp is better. We have our family and our friends.”

A fish under a roof. A stick figure without a head. A series of lines that look like a garden rake.

These symbols are part of an entirely undeciphered script from a sophisticated ancient civilization thousands of years old. And they remain an enduring mystery that has sparked heated debates, death threats to researchers, and cash prizes for the coveted answer.

The latest such prize was offered last month by the chief minister of one Indian state: $1 million to anyone who can decode the script of the Indus Valley civilization, which stretched across what is now Pakistan and northern India.

“A really important question about the pre-history of South Asia could potentially be settled if we are able to completely decipher the script,” said Rajesh P. N. Rao, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who has worked on it for more than a decade.

If deciphered, the script could offer a glimpse into a Bronze Age civilization believed to rival ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some believe this vast domain held millions of people, with cities that boasted advanced urban planning, standardized weights and measures, and extensive trade routes.

Perhaps more importantly, it might help answer fundamental questions about who the Indus Valley people and their descendants were – a politically fraught debate about the disputed roots of modern India and its indigenous inhabitants.

“Whichever group is trying to claim that civilization would get to claim that they were among the first to have urban planning, this amazing trade, and they were navigating seas to do global trade,” Rao said.

“It has a lot of cachet if you can claim that, ‘Those were our people who were doing that.’”

Why is it so hard to decipher?

Though the script has remained unsolved since its earliest samples were published in 1875, we do know a little about Indus Valley culture itself – thanks to archaeological excavations of major cities like Mohenjo-daro, located in what is now Pakistan’s Sindh province, about 510 kilometers (317 miles) northeast of Karachi.

These cities were designed along a grid system like New York City or Barcelona, and were equipped with drainage and water management systems – features which at that point were “unparalleled in history,” one paper said.

Throughout the second and third millennia BC, Indus merchants traded with people across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, their ships bringing copper ingots, pearls, spices and ivory. They crafted gold and silver jewelry, and built faraway settlements and colonies.

Eventually around 1800 BC – still more than 1,000 years before the birth of ancient Rome – the civilization collapsed and people migrated to smaller villages. Some believe climate change was the driving factor, with evidence of long droughts, shifting temperatures, and unpredictable rainfall that could have damaged agriculture in those final few centuries.

But what we know about the Indus civilization is limited compared with the wealth of information available about its contemporaries, such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Maya. That is largely because of the undeciphered script, which was found on artifacts such as pottery and stone seals.

There are a few reasons it’s been so hard to decode. First, there aren’t that many artifacts to analyze – archaeologists have only found about 4,000 inscriptions, compared with an estimated 5 million words available in ancient Egyptian, which includes hieroglyphics and other variants.

Many of those Indus relics are very small, often stone seals measuring one square inch – meaning the script on them is short, most sequences containing only four or five symbols.

Crucially, there isn’t yet a bilingual artifact containing both the Indus Valley script and its translation into another language, as the Rosetta Stone does for ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek. And we don’t have clues such as names of recognized Indus rulers that could help crack the script – the way the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy helped decipher ancient Egyptian.

There are some things that experts largely agree on. Most believe the script was written from right to left, and many speculate it was used for both religious and economic purposes, such as marking items for trade. There are even some interpretations of signs that multiple experts agree on – a headless stick figure representing a person, for instance.

However, until a Rosetta Stone equivalent is found, these remain unproven theories. “No unanimity has been reached even on the basic issues,” wrote Indus experts Jagat Pati Joshi and Asko Parpola in a 1987 book that catalogued hundreds of seals and inscriptions.

Even decades later, “not a single sign is deciphered yet,” said Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, who worked with Rao on the project and has studied the script for nearly 20 years.

Controversial theories

For some people, solving the script isn’t just about intellectual curiosity or academic study – it’s a high-stakes existential question.

That’s because they believe it could settle the controversy of who exactly the Indus people were, and which way migration flowed, in or out of India.

There are two main groups vying to claim the Indus civilization. One group argues the script has links to Indo-European languages such as ancient Sanskrit, which spawned many languages now spoken across northern India.

Most scholars believe Aryan migrants from Central Asia brought Indo-European languages to India. But this group argues it was the other way around – that Sanskrit and its relatives originated in the Indus Valley civilization and spread out toward Europe, said Rao.

He described their claim as: “Everything was within India to begin with … Nothing came from outside.”

Then there’s a second group that believes the script is linked to the Dravidian language family now largely spoken across South India – suggesting Dravidian languages were there first, widely spoken across the region before being pushed out by the arrival of Aryans in the north.

M. K. Stalin, the southern Tamil Nadu state leader offering the $1 million prize, is among those who believe the Indus language was a Dravidian ancestor – which Rao described as the more “traditional” theory, though there are respected scholars on both sides.

Then there are some like Indus expert Iravatham Mahadevan, who argued there’s little point in the debate since the distinction between northern Aryans and southern Dravidians isn’t clear anyway.

“There are no Dravidian people or Aryan people – just like both Pakistanis and Indians are racially very similar,” he said in a 1998 interview.

“We are both the product of a very long period of intermarriage, there have been migrations … You cannot now racially segregate any element of the Indian population.”

Still, the question is fraught. In a 2011 TED Talk, Rao said he received hate mail after publishing some of his findings. Other researchers have described receiving death threats – including Steve Farmer, who along with his colleagues stunned the academic world in 2004 by arguing the Indus script doesn’t represent a language at all, but is merely a set of symbols like those we’d see on modern traffic signs.

How they’re trying to crack it

Despite these tensions, the script has long enamored researchers and amateur enthusiasts, with some dedicating their careers to the conundrum.

Some, like Parpola – one of the eminent experts in the field – have tried figuring out the meaning behind certain signs. For instance, he suggests, in many Dravidian languages the words for “fish” and “star” sound the same, and stars were often used to symbolize deities in other ancient scripts – so Indus symbols that look like fish might represent gods.

Other researchers, like Rao and Yadav, are more focused on finding patterns within the script. To do this, they train computer models to analyze a string of signs – then take away certain signs until the computer can accurately guess what the missing symbols are.

This is useful for several reasons: We can better understand patterns in how the script works – like how the letter “Q” is most often followed by “U” in English – and it can help researchers fill in the gaps for artifacts with damaged or missing signs.

Significantly, knowing these common patterns can help identify sequences that don’t follow the rules. Yadav pointed to seals found in West Asia, far from the Indus Valley; while they used the same Indus signs, they followed entirely different patterns, suggesting the script may have evolved to be used across different languages, similar to the Latin alphabet.

Then there are your average Joes, fans of the puzzle who want to try their hand at solving it. With the announcement of the $1 million prize – though no clear information about where people can apply for it – amateurs have flocked to experts to eagerly share their theories.

“I used to get about one or two emails a week. But now, after the prize was sent out, I pretty much get emails every day,” Rao said. They come from all sorts of people around the world, writing in different languages – with even families working on the puzzle together.

After so many years, Rao swings between optimism and resignation. Any further breakthrough would require international multi-disciplinary teamwork, massive funding, and even political negotiations to allow excavations in border areas disputed by India and Pakistan, he said.

But on good days, he’s still hopeful. So is Yadav, who has been fascinated by the Indus Valley civilization since learning about in the fourth grade. Even without the promise of a solution, the beauty of the task draws her back year after year.

“I look forward to working on the problem every day,” she said. “If we decipher the script, it will open a window into the lives and ideology of Indus people. We will get to know a lot of things about our ancestors … what they were thinking, what were they focused on?”

These details are “just hiding from us today,” she added. “That keeps me glued to the problem rather than anything else.”

Western leaders scrambled to back Ukraine after Friday’s acrimonious meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky deepened the already yawning fault lines between Washington and many of its key allies.

The remarkable Oval Office exchange highlights a tricky balancing act facing Western capitals since Trump’s return to office in January: maintaining steadfast support for Zelensky and Kyiv against Russian aggression, while not alienating a famously transactional president who appears increasingly sympathetic to President Valdimir Putin, tolerates little criticism and is upturning decades of transatlantic security alliances.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who met Trump in the White House on Thursday in one of the trickiest visits by a British leader to Washington in decades, spoke with both the US president and Zelensky following their shouting match, according to a Downing Street spokeswoman.

Starmer “retains his unwavering support for Ukraine and is playing his part to find a path forward to a lasting peace, based on sovereignty and security for Ukraine,” the spokeswoman said.

The UK is set to host a summit of European leaders on Sunday to discuss support for Kyiv. Zelensky is expected to attend what’s likely to be a much more welcoming setting for the Ukrainian leader, with Starmer having urged Trump against accepting any peace deal in Ukraine that would “reward” Russia or its allies.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a key Trump ally in Europe, also called for a summit with the US and European nations to discuss the war in Ukraine, saying that division makes the West weaker.

Europe’s leaders and officials have been blindsided by a staggering collapse in American support for Ukraine in the past weeks, after almost three years of ironclad backing by the previous administration of Joe Biden. Many still cannot understand why US President Donald Trump has turned so furiously on Zelensky and conceded key concessions to Putin before even starting talks.

Zelensky has spoken to French President Emmanuel Macron and to European Council President António Costa following his scathing exchange with Trump at the White House, according to a Ukrainian source with knowledge of the situation.

“There is an aggressor, which is Russia, and an attacked people, which is Ukraine,” Macron later said in a statement.

“Nobody wants peace more than the Ukrainians do,” wrote German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on X. “Therefore we are working on a common path to a lasting and just peace. Ukraine can rely on Germany – and on Europe.”

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said in a statement that it’s “clear that the free world needs a new leader.” European Union leaders also issued a joint statement urging Zelensky to “be strong.”

Zelensky has also spoken to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, a source said.

“Ukraine, you’ll never walk alone,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said, while Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna cautioned that if “Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine.”

There was swift vocal support too from key US allies outside Europe.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would “continue to stand with Ukraine.”

“Russia illegally and unjustifiably invaded Ukraine. For three years now, Ukrainians have fought with courage and resilience. Their fight for democracy, freedom, and sovereignty is a fight that matters to us all,” Trudeau wrote on X.

Australia’s prime minister reiterated his country’s support for Kyiv, saying it will “continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

“We stand unequivocally with Ukraine in their struggle, because we regard that as a struggle for the upholding of international law,” Anthony Albanese said.

Ukraine, you’ll never walk alone’

A notable exception to the wave of European solidarity was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a far-right populist and Trump ally, who took to X to stand with the US president.

“Strong men make peace, weak men make war,” Orban wrote. “Today President (Trump) stood bravely for peace. Even if it was difficult for many to digest. Thank you, Mr. President!”

The tense exchange with Trump boosted Zelensky’s backing among many at home, with Ukraine’s lawmakers rallying behind Kyiv’s leader.

Merezhko said there’s “absolutely no doubt” that the Ukrainian parliament will back Zelensky.

“We are united behind our president but at the same time, we hope that wisdom and common sense will prevail.”

Ukraine’s military, who have spent more than three years holding back a far larger Russian force with the help of US and European aid, also maintained a message of defiance, at least on public channels.

“Trump understands the aggressive manner of negotiations and is trying to crush Zelensky,” said Stanislav Buniatov, another Ukrainian military officer, in a Telegram post. “There would have been no heated talks if Trump had offered at least a ceasefire on the contact line with minimal amendments.”

One military officer, who goes by the callsign Aleks, said on Telegram he doesn’t “give a damn” about the kind of peace Trump offers.

“It’s better to fight to death than to freeze the war and then be drained again in three years,” he said.

The sky felt like it split over Kyiv.

On a horizon where drones and airstrikes have killed 47 civilians in Ukraine in the past 10 days, superlatives rained: the most consequential moment in the war since Russia’s invasion; the ugliest personality clash — between a 48-year-old comedian turned wartime leader and a septuagenarian billionaire turned US president; the most significant turning point in European history since 1989 or even 1945.

After Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky found himself berated for lack of gratitude on live television by US President Donald Trump and his Vice President JD Vance on Friday, Ukraine seemed immediately unsure whether to be furious at his treatment – after their collective survival of three years of Russian bombardment and savagery – at the hands of wealthy American elites, or to panickedly seek remedy in Kyiv’s relationship with the ally it likely cannot endure without.

Ukrainian military channels on Telegram fumed they would rather die on their feet, than beg on their knees. Kyiv officials exuded solidarity. But the carpet under their feet was suddenly gone.

There is “nothing we can do to fix this,” a senior US official told me – adding that the fix must come from Zelensky. Trump-whisperer Sen. Lindsey Graham speculated Zelensky should fix it fast or step aside. US politicians are used to their words having an outsized impact, but Friday they rippled across the established norms of European security and made a continent, just about recovered from the horrific whiplash of the past 10 days, suddenly check their seatbelts again.

Zelensky’s task on Friday had been simple and almost complete, a draft agreement on a critical minerals deal waiting to be signed. The mood in his meeting was adequately convivial – not even derailed by his tough rhetoric on Putin. The wartime leader’s wardrobe choices – a black, long-sleeved shirt that he’s always worn – may not have been to Trump’s liking, a US official told me, but did not overturn the apple cart. It took Vance – who often attends, but rarely speaks in, Trump’s international meetings – to do that.

Misinformation is often the luxury of the privileged. The basic essentials of your life – electricity, food and water – must be in place to afford the privilege of propagating or believing untruths. When Zelensky was confronted with a vice-presidential lecture on Russian diplomacy – which since 2014 has openly advanced little but Moscow’s military goals in Ukraine, he talked back. Well, he tried to.

When Trump later told him he had “no cards,” Zelensky replied: “I am not playing cards.” Ukrainians are not playing cards but dying in a rate less than the fantastical figures Trump keeps citing, though at an adequately horrific pace of hundreds a week, that they too want peace.

This is the gruesome gulf between the parties in the Oval Office. On one side, a country where the facts of war are personal as they involve relatives and friends who are never coming home, and homes that will never be returned to. On the other, America’s right flank feeling scorned because its aid – given to defeat a decades-long adversary at no cost of American life – had not been received with enough gratitude.

“You’re not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing,” said Trump, as though the cost of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives was not somehow a sign of appreciation.

Zelensky later said in an interview with Fox News he didn’t feel he owed Trump an apology, but he thought the relationship could be salvaged.

Trump and Vance have never seen war up close, but are still disgusted by it. They seem to have felt Zelensky, soaked in war’s horror for three years, needed a lecture about the peace anyone who had seen war would yearn for. Moneyed ignorance loudly lectured exhausted experience.

Where do we go from here? Zelensky has probably endured the defining moment of his presidency. He must either magically heal this rift, somehow survive without America, or else step aside and let someone else try – the last perhaps the easiest. Yet stepping down from power, as Moscow would like, could spark a crisis on the front lines, eroding political clarity, and in the legitimacy of the government in Kyiv, where parliamentary processes or flawed wartime elections would likely stumble in producing a clean successor.

There are no good choices ahead, no sure bets. Yet one thing is comforting since I came back to Kyiv. Europe’s security – after three daunting weeks of the Trump administration questioning democracy and alliances across the continent – may seem in crisis from the comfortable perspective in London, or Paris, or Munich. Somehow in Kyiv after three years, the doubts feel lighter. Waves of drones come nightly here, yet the city adapts, the people endure, the lights stay on.

This resilience makes Zelensky’s bristling at being lectured by Vance on his nation’s sacrifice and peril easier to understand. As one Ukrainian civilian summarized it last night: “Dignity is also a value. If Russia cannot destroy it, why does the US think it can?”