Palestine weekly: Global outcry fails to break West Bank siege

For more than a week, Israeli settlers have besieged three Palestinian families in their homes in Qusra, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, cutting them off from basic supplies and emergency services.

Settlers used the same tactic just last month to force the al-Tubassi family from their home in Jalud. This time, however, with one of the besieged Qusra homes belonging to a Palestinian-American, the siege has become front-page news.

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The United Nations, France, Spain and the United Kingdom have issued condemnations, and the White House was reported to be pressing Netanyahu to publicly denounce settler violence. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a staunch settlement supporter, broke publicly with the Israeli government to call the besieging settlers “Israeli terrorists”.

On August 13, Israeli forces ordered the families to evacuate, saying the homes would be seized “to protect” them, and converted 16 homes in the town into military barracks. Soldiers entered Qusra that day. Israeli forces briefly detained one Israeli suspect during a later overnight operation dismantling nearby outpost structures, but no other arrests of settlers have been reported. Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara Rosas said the siege reflected “an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel”.

For a second week, 15 Palestinians, including two children, remain trapped in their homes. Soldiers spent two days dismantling the settlers’ tent, only to put up their own in the same spot, effectively continuing the closure. Municipal crews eventually restored electricity and water, but the families say they have been told they can’t leave their homes. Speaking to Al Jazeera the same day, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese called Qusra the “climax” of Israel’s “decades-long rule of impunity”, saying Israeli officials “appear to be collaborating with settlers rather than restraining them”.

Nonetheless, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered the Israeli military to prepare a plan for transferring responsibility for civilian law enforcement to the Israeli police – a move critics questioned as impractical and warned could further advance Israel’s de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank.

Settlers uncowed

Rather than being encumbered by the global outcry, settlers have carried out similar sieges – with soldiers again standing by or actively assisting.

On August 16, in Beit Imrin, north of Nablus – a village nominally under full Palestinian civil and security control – settlers besieged a home for more than three hours, blocking residents and ambulances from reaching those inside. Israeli forces then raided the house themselves, arrested all nine people inside, and withdrew. Soldiers separately blocked Palestine Red Crescent crews from the area and confiscated their ambulance keys.

For years, the legal architecture of West Bank dispossession – including firing-zone designations, “state land” declarations and a permit regime that effectively criminalises Palestinian construction – has operated overwhelmingly in Area C, the area of the West Bank under full Israeli control. It has fallen hardest on Bedouin and herding communities who have experienced massive forcible displacement as a result.

Beit Imrin has none of that legal exposure. But as the Qusra siege leads settlers to widen such tactics, the week’s developments suggest that where the traditional legal toolkit of the occupation doesn’t reach – like the areas of the West Bank under nominal Palestinian control – the pattern is becoming clear: settlers establish a tent adjacent to homes and are not removed; Palestinians’ homes are besieged, with water, power, supplies and medical services cut off; and soldiers arrive not to remove the settlers, but increasingly to remove the family – through arrest or ostensibly for their “protection”.

On August 16, settlers also pitched tents for a new outpost near Umm Safa, northwest of Ramallah, which, the Wafa news agency reported, brings the number of outposts surrounding Umm Safa and neighbouring Burqa to six; settlers have already seized most of Umm Safa’s and Burqa’s surrounding lands.

As new outposts were built without authorisation, Israeli forces demolished homes in Qalandiya, north of Jerusalem; Masara, south of Bethlehem; and Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem, according to pictures and videos shared among local activists. Israeli authorities also forced Sami Abu Rahma to demolish his own farm in al-Mughayyir, days after his son was shot by settlers working the same land.

The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission told Wafa that Israeli authorities carried out 80 demolitions in July alone, hitting 165 structures, with 34 further notices issued.

Gaza’s trajectory hangs in the balance

A Board of Peace official told Al Jazeera on Monday that the body had agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel did not need to withdraw its forces from Gaza until Hamas disarms – including both light and heavy weapons, and the dismantling of its tunnel network.

That comes after Netanyahu had publicly rejected the disarmament agreement announced by US President Donald Trump last month. The deal had initially envisaged a phased withdrawal occurring alongside a phased disarmament.

At the same time, in a podcast with former Israeli captive Rom Braslavski, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Israeli forces should kill “30 or 40” people in Gaza every night, going beyond those who pose an immediate threat. The far-right minister said he opposed Netanyahu’s decision to scale back strikes under the current truce, called for encouraging Palestinians to leave Gaza permanently alongside new Israeli settlement of the Strip, and offered to help arrange for Braslavski to personally execute prisoners under Israel’s newly enacted death-penalty law for Palestinians. Ben-Gvir holds no formal authority to order military strikes but sits on Israel’s security cabinet.

It is against that tension – between US pressure to advance the ceasefire and demands from Israel’s far right for intensified attacks – that Israeli strikes this week resumed, though still at a pace markedly lower than two weeks earlier. On August 12, a strike on a motorised rickshaw in Beit Lahiya killed municipal worker Mohanad Saada, returning from repairing a war-damaged well – Israel’s first air strike in Gaza in more than a week.

On August 13, a drone fired three missiles at a four-wheel drive vehicle in Gaza City, killing Colonel Jamal Abu Kamil, the city’s civil police chief; the Israeli military said it targeted a Hamas commander, a claim Gaza’s police and Interior Ministry rejected. More attacks were reported in the following days.

Beneath the week’s violence, a report from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor found that Israel is crushing and trucking rubble out of the Strip – more than 10 million tonnes have already been removed. The group says the process erases property boundaries and risks destroying evidence relevant to the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel.

Meanwhile, vital supplies continue to be severely restricted from entering Gaza; on August 15, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said only 12 of the Strip’s 34 oxygen-generating stations remained functional, with no spare parts entering the territory, according to Wafa. Doctors said that cancer patients are dying at two to three times the pre-war rate after Israel destroyed the Strip’s only specialised cancer hospital.

Alongside 21 additional bodies recovered in Khan Younis underneath the rubble, the Palestine Red Crescent also recovered the body of 14-year-old Suhail Masoud Shalouf on August 16, after he was shot the previous evening near the so-called “Yellow Line” in an area rescuers had been unable to reach.

By August 17, Gaza’s Ministry of Health had counted 1,265 Palestinians killed since the October “ceasefire” – and 73,399 killed since October 7, 2023.

Reporting originally appeared via Al Jazeera. Read the full source for additional context.