West Bank & Jerusalem
Israeli settlers held the Qusra hilltop as its American owner returned
Image credit: Qusra, Nablus governorate — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Loui Ridi flew from Ohio to the hill above Qusra to stand on his own land. On Tuesday, the tenth day of the siege, the settlers camped on it were still there and the soldiers around them told him to go back inside his house.
Ridi, 46, owns one of the three homes on Ras al-Ein that dozens of Israeli settlers have surrounded since 9 August. He reached the property on Monday under military escort and confronted the settlers the next morning, the Associated Press reported. Soldiers asked the settlers to leave peacefully. They did not remove them.
Getting to his own front door took contacts and an intervention by the American embassy, Al Jazeera reported, and soldiers held him for about half an hour on the way up. He arrived with journalists and raised the American flag over the roof — a message, he said, that any settler who takes the house will have to pull that flag down before raising another.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA counted the tenth consecutive day of the siege on Tuesday and described what residents see happening: an attempt to take the properties and fix a new reality on the ground. Three houses remain encircled, the families cannot come and go, and the army's closed-military-zone order covers the same hill the settlers move across freely.
If I need to walk outside of my house, I'm not able. I have to get a permission and coordination and it's going to take hours if it's even possible to leave.
Loui Ridi, owner of one of the besieged houses
What ten days have done to fifteen people#
Fifteen people from the Abu Rida and Hassan families live in the three homes, among them two children under seven. Water and electricity were cut on 10 August and have not come back.
A UNICEF team reached the families on Monday with water, food, medicines, hygiene supplies and recreational kits for the children, the United Nations said — the first delivery to get through after a week in which repair crews were driven off, electricity workers were detained and a water tanker was turned away at the road.
Ridi told the American agency what he says to his daughters in Ohio when they call. "I have to lie and say, 'No, I'm safe. I'm OK,' because I want her to sleep," he said.
He does not expect the army's presence to settle anything. "As soon as they leave — like if they leave today — probably on the same day or a couple hours later, the settlers may come back," he said, describing a pattern Qusra's mayor, Abdel Azim Wadi, has now counted nine times in seven months on this one hill.
Washington keeps talking, Israel has not answered#
The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, went back on Israeli television on Tuesday and defended the word he used for the men on the hill. Asked by Channel 12 about calling them Israeli terrorists, he held to it, explaining that under the American definition an act that makes people fear to live their lives is terror.
Huckabee was also asked whether he was disappointed that Benjamin Netanyahu has still not condemned the siege, after reports that Washington pressed the prime minister to say something publicly. "What we're looking for is responsible action," he answered.
He was candid about why the case reached his desk at all. Ridi holds American citizenship, and Huckabee said that had he not, "we would have expressed concern" — and nothing more.
Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, has meanwhile ordered the army to hand civilian law enforcement over settlers in the West Bank to the police, an instruction he issued during this siege and one that the Israeli press now reports he never coordinated with his own commanders.
On the hill itself nothing in that argument has changed anything. The tents are up, the pipes are dry, and a man who came from Ohio to open his own front door needs hours of coordination to walk outside it.
