West Bank & Jerusalem
Israeli soldiers wounded a girl and an elderly woman inside besieged Qusra
Image credit: Qusra, Nablus governorate — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Israeli soldiers stormed a house in Qusra, south of Nablus, and wounded a 15-year-old girl and a 70-year-old woman, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said, as the settler siege of three families on the village's edge entered its twelfth day on Thursday.
The Red Crescent gave the ages of both and said its crews treated them after the raid on Wednesday evening. Palestinian accounts of the incident say soldiers opened live fire inside the house; the version carried in the Israeli press described the two as wounded by shrapnel. The army has not published an account of the raid.
Three homes in the Ras al-Ein area on the eastern edge of Qusra have been surrounded since 9 August. Abdel-Azim Wadi, who heads the village council, said the families are still prevented from going in or coming out, and that one of their houses has been turned into a military position.
The area around the homes remains a closed military zone. Wadi said food and medicine are not reaching the families, whose water and electricity were cut in the first days of the siege, and that supplies get through only when soldiers allow them.
The families are prevented from entering or leaving.
Abdel-Azim Wadi, head of the Qusra village council, quoted by the official Wafa news agency on the twelfth day of the siege
The army cleared a different outpost on Thursday#
On Thursday morning, Israeli forces evacuated an unauthorised settler outpost near Deir Istiya, in Area B of the occupied West Bank, and detained four people after settlers blocked roads and threw stones at officers, the Israeli military said.
That is the measure Qusra's families have asked for since 9 August and have not received. The settlers on the hilltop above their homes have not been cleared, and the closed-military-zone order still covers the ground they move across freely.
Settlers also set fire to a Palestinian home in the southern West Bank early Thursday, according to reports carried in the Israeli press. The family got out.
What has already been established#
Israeli forces seized sixteen homes in Qusra last week and used them as barracks, according to the village council. Amnesty International called the siege on 14 August "coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel", in a statement over the name of Erika Guevara Rosas, its senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns.
Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, called the settlers holding the families "Israeli terrorists" on 14 August. Twelve days into the siege, no Israeli authority has acted on that description, and the three families are still counting the days from inside their houses.
