West Bank & Jerusalem
Settlers burned land and pepper-sprayed workers inside besieged Qusra
Image credit: Qusra, Nablus governorate — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Dozens of Israeli settlers moved into Qusra on Saturday, burning land at the edge of the village and attacking Palestinian workers with pepper spray, on the twenty-first day of the settler siege of three families there.
Masked settlers sprayed the workers and threw stones at the building where they were working, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported. Its correspondent Matan Golan noted that this happened although Israeli forces have been stationed in the area continuously for a fortnight, under an operation to clear settler outposts at Qusra and neighbouring Jalud.
Accounts carried in the Israeli press the same afternoon described dozens of settlers reaching the village outskirts and pulling stones off a road. Footage circulating on Saturday showed fires burning near the village, which residents attributed to the settlers.
No Israeli authority commented on the fires. The army's spokesman confirmed only a deployment, saying soldiers and Border Police were sent to Qusra after a report that Israeli rioters had reached the village area, in a statement carried by the Israeli news site Walla.
Inside a closed zone the army declared itself#
Qusra lies inside a closed military zone the Israeli army declared at the start of the siege. Settlers were filmed on Saturday driving through it unhindered.
The army dismantled several outposts settlers had raised on the village's edge when the blockade began, and has kept forces on the ground over the past week to stop the structures going back up. Saturday produced the shape of that arrangement in one afternoon: the outposts are gone, and the settlers are not.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that settlers besieged Palestinian young men inside a house in the Nablus-area town on Saturday and attacked a family and foreign visitors with it.
Twenty-one days on the hill#
Three homes in the Ras al-Ein quarter, on high ground at the eastern edge of Qusra, have been surrounded since 9 August. Fifteen people of the Abu Rida and Hassan families live in them.
Over three weeks this paper has recorded the water and electricity cut and later restored by the municipality, a water tanker turned back, municipal and utility crews assaulted and detained, a girl of fifteen and a woman of seventy wounded in a night raid, and journalists blocked from the road.
Amnesty International put the pattern in the international record on 14 August, when its senior director Erika Guevara Rosas called the siege "coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel" and asked for sanctions on the Israeli officials responsible.
The Israeli army has still not published an account of what its soldiers at Qusra are ordered to do when settlers arrive. Saturday is the twenty-first day the families have waited for one.
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