No Food, No Power, No Way Out.
A Palestinian family has been trapped inside their home on the outskirts of Qusra, south of Nablus, for a third consecutive day, after settlers erected a makeshift structure directly in front of the entrance and blocked all access in and out. Homeowner Youssef Hassan, who lives there with his wife and their two daughters, aged two and four, said settlers first set up the structure blocking his door two days earlier and have since prevented anyone from entering or leaving, also cutting the home’s electricity lines. By the third day, he said the family was running out of food and that his two-year-old daughter needed to see a doctor.
Soldiers Arrived — and Prayed With the Settlers Instead of Removing Them.
Hassan said he has lived in the house for five years, and that settlers had been coming to the property and harassing the family for around seven months before the situation escalated sharply over the past two days, when access routes were fully blocked. He said he is now trying to find any way to get his wife and daughters out safely, citing fears over the danger the settlers pose to them. Video footage from the scene showed settlers gathered inside the structure they built and attempting to open one of the yard’s gates. Soldiers were filmed arriving at the site on Sunday and praying alongside the settlers before leaving without dismantling the structure or ending the siege. On the site’s edge, a second Palestinian man, Qusai Abu Ridi, who moved into his brother’s adjacent home four months earlier, has also been trapped there with his son since Sunday because of the same outpost.
A Pattern Israel’s Own Military Calls “Illegal” — Without Acting.
The Israeli military has said it condemns the establishment of settler outposts inside Palestinian villages in the West Bank in recent days, describing the practice as illegal, reprehensible, and unacceptable — without explaining why it has not dismantled the structure trapping the Hassan family, or why soldiers were filmed praying with the settlers rather than removing them. A Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance reached the site to evacuate one girl for medical treatment and bring some food to the besieged families, though the siege itself remained in place.
The tactic mirrors one used weeks earlier against the Tubasi family in the nearby village of Jalud, who were besieged for roughly two weeks — cut off from electricity, water, food, and medical supplies, and repeatedly attacked, including by arson — before settlers stormed the property and forced the family out at gunpoint under the watch of Israeli soldiers. Qusra has faced a wave of settler attacks in recent months, some turning deadly, launched from a nearby hilltop outpost; the escalation across the wider Nablus area follows a deadly confrontation late last month in the nearby village of Tal that left four Palestinians and two Israelis dead, after which Israeli ministers called for collective punishment against Palestinian communities and at least thirteen new unauthorized settler outposts went up in the area, with political leadership blocking the army from removing them.