West Bank & Jerusalem
Amnesty says Israel enables and funds the settler siege of Qusra
Image credit: Qusra, Nablus governorate — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Amnesty International has declared the siege of three Palestinian families in Qusra the product of "coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel" — and called for sanctions on the senior Israeli officials responsible.
The statement, issued Friday over the name of Erika Guevara Rosas, the organization's senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, moves the week's most closely watched story in the occupied West Bank into the formal international record. As it was published, the families were completing a sixth day sealed inside their homes. By Saturday the siege had entered a full week.
"The horrors unfolding in Qusra are far from an isolated incident," Guevara Rosas wrote. They reflect, she said, "the relentless escalation and expansion of an accelerating and well-documented pattern" of settler violence across the occupied West Bank, with the aim of displacing Palestinians from their land.
Israel, as the occupying power, has a legal obligation to protect the Palestinian population under its control and not to stand by — or worse, stand with settlers — while they lay siege to Palestinian homes.
Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International, 14 August
A week under siege#
The organization's account matches what this paper has reported day by day. Since Sunday 9 August, settlers from a structure raised beside the Tel Talpiot outpost have penned three families — fifteen people, among them small children — inside their homes in the Ras al-Ein quarter of Qusra, south-east of Nablus.
The settlers cut the electricity and the water lines. Soldiers turned back the ambulance sent for a sick two-year-old, and settlers attacked the Haaretz journalists who walked toward the houses.
On Thursday, close to one hundred Palestinian, Israeli and foreign activists marched toward Qusra carrying food and water. Israeli soldiers stopped them on the road under a closed-military-zone order, Al Jazeera reported.
That evening the army pulled down the settlers' tent. By Friday morning the settlers had rebuilt it at the families' doors. Local officials say the army has told the village council its operation to clear the outpost will run until Sunday — which leaves the families besieged while it does.
What Amnesty demands#
Amnesty's demand goes past the removal of one tent. Governments must stop treating each such incident as isolated, Guevara Rosas wrote, and impose sanctions on the senior Israeli officials responsible for international crimes — naming the crimes against humanity of apartheid and the forcible transfer of Palestinians in what the organization calls the unlawfully occupied West Bank.
The demand lands in a week when Washington's own ambassador, Mike Huckabee, called the men at Qusra's doors "Israeli terrorists," and the State Department pressed Benjamin Netanyahu to condemn the siege. The United Nations human rights office issued its own condemnation.
None of that pressure has opened the road to the three houses. The families drew well water for a seventh night while the men outside rebuilt their tent.
The pattern behind one village#
Qusra has stood among the most frequently attacked villages of the northern West Bank for over a decade, and the mechanism on display there — a structure raised beside the nearest Palestinian homes, then pressure applied until the families leave — is the one this paper traced through the first-half figures it has reported: 660 settler attacks, a rise of 63 percent, with 140 Palestinians wounded and six killed.
Amnesty's statement fixes that pattern to its author. The organization's finding is that the siege is not a failure of the Israeli state to control its settlers, but a method of the state itself — funded, protected and repeated. Residents told reporters through the week what they believe comes next if the siege succeeds: the houses themselves.
