West Bank & Jerusalem
Israeli police arrest a first settler over the Qusra attack
Running file The Qusra File DAY 25 →
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Israeli police and the Shin Bet security service arrested a 19-year-old settler on Thursday on suspicion of taking part in Saturday's attack on the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. It is the first arrest in this file since settlers put up an outpost above the village on 9 August and the army sealed the hillside beneath it.
The suspect lives in a settlement in the northern part of the occupied West Bank and his name has not been released for publication, the Times of Israel reported. Police said the joint team "continues its efforts to collect evidence and gather testimony to locate and arrest everyone who took part in the serious incident," and the young man was to be brought before a court for a custody extension.
The arrest follows Monday's court request for warrants, which this paper reported on 1 September, and a High Court petition by ten Qusra residents arguing that the army never enforced its own closure order against the settlers.
What the arrest answers, and what it does not#
Saturday's attack is the incident under investigation: dozens of settlers entered Qusra in the early afternoon of 29 August, stoned the home of Louay Adli and took the building with him inside. Adli put the crowd at sixty or seventy men. The army said the next morning that it knew of no allegations of violence.
President Isaac Herzog called the perpetrators "juvenile delinquents" on Thursday and said the authorities were making "a major effort" to bring people to justice.
The arrest does not touch the siege itself. At Ras al-Ein, below the outpost, three houses holding fifteen members of the Abu Rida and Hassan families entered their twenty-fifth day surrounded on Thursday. The Ynet correspondent Oded Shalom, who tried to reach the Abu Rida house this week, wrote that Border Police pickups blocked the trail before letting him through after questioning.
Qusra's imam, Ziad Uda, told him that seventy per cent of the village's farmland has gone to settlements over the years, that four houses have been burned completely and seven partially, and that forty of the village's young men have been jailed since the attacks began.
Israeli police separately announced eight other arrests on Thursday over assaults on Palestinians and mosque arsons elsewhere in the West Bank, among them an army conscript and two settlers aged 16 and 18 detained at Ben Gurion Airport on their way to Ukraine.
The United States ambassador, Mike Huckabee, called the Qusra siege unacceptable on 13 August. As of Thursday night no charge sheet had been published against anyone in the file.
