Israeli Press
Israeli soldiers block the ambulance sent to a besieged Qusra family
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Soldiers stopped a Palestinian ambulance overnight before it could reach a family sealed inside its house at Qusra, south-east of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. The vehicle was carrying a foreign journalist. Israeli forces were filmed turning it back.
By Tuesday the family had been shut in for a third day.
Youssef Hassan lives in the house with his wife and their two daughters, aged two and four. Settlers put a makeshift structure up in front of his entrance on Sunday, he told the Times of Israel, and have let nobody in or out since. They also cut the electricity lines.
He said the family expected to run out of food during the day, and that his two-year-old needed to see a doctor.
How the outpost went up#
The structure is an offshoot of the Tel Talpiot outpost, raised beside Palestinian homes on the edge of the village, the Israeli news site Ynet reported on Monday.
Abdelazim Wadi, who heads the Qusra local council, described the effect in a call with that site. "There are houses under siege, they cut their electricity and we cannot get food through to them," he said. Three households are affected.
Footage from the site showed Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers who put the structure up. The army told Ynet that commanders are examining the documented incident and that disciplinary steps will follow the findings.
Security sources told the same site that the military was preparing to remove the outpost. No date was given, and the families were still cut off on Tuesday.
The reporters who tried to get there#
Settlers blocked journalists from reaching the house on Monday, Haaretz reported. Its own West Bank correspondent, Matan Golan, and its photojournalist Itai Ron were attacked as they made their way towards the property.
That is the second documented obstruction in the same file: first the road to the house, then the ambulance on it.
The mechanism, and the numbers#
Qusra has been among the most frequently attacked villages in the northern West Bank for a decade. The pattern here — a structure raised beside the nearest houses, then the pressure applied to them — is the one this paper traced through the settler-violence figures for the first half of this year.
Those figures record 660 attacks, a rise of 63 percent, with 140 Palestinians wounded and six killed.
They cut their electricity and we cannot get food through to them.
Abdelazim Wadi, head of the Qusra local council, to Ynet
What the Israeli accounts add is the sequence, and now its third day. The outpost went up, the power went off, the road closed, the ambulance was turned back — and the investigation that opened was into the prayer, not the siege.
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