Israeli Press
Ynet finds settlers besiege whole villages until residents flee their homes
Image credit: Turmus Ayya, occupied West Bank — Wikimedia Commons / Amerhaddad, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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The siege of a house at Qusra that drew condemnation from Washington is not an isolated case, the Israeli news site Ynet reported on Monday. It is a method, and it is working.
In an investigation published by the reporter Oded Shalom, Ynet describes young men from the farm outposts settling at the edge of a Palestinian village, blocking its roads and its water, and staying until the residents conclude they cannot go on and leave. The report names Jalud, Jiljilya, Atara, Tal, Qarawat Bani Hassan, Qabalan, Beita and Jurish alongside Qusra.
Mahmoud Tubasi told Ynet what the end of that process looks like in his own family's case at Jalud, south-east of Nablus. Settlers poured fuel on the doors of the houses and set them alight on 3 April, he said. The water and the electricity were cut, and appeals to the army changed nothing.
"We were left without water, without flour, without rice. We understood it was lost — and we left."
Mahmoud Tubasi, formerly of Jalud, to Ynet
The family walked out on 22 July. "We left on foot," Tubasi said. "Can you believe that? On foot."
At Jiljilya, north of Ramallah, Yosef Muzahem described settlers' herds put into the village's crops and armed men arriving at the edge of the built-up area. "What kind of life is this, when they won't let you go out?" he asked the site. He said the men came with guns and threatened to kill.
The line that has moved#
The most consequential figures in the report concern where this is happening. Ynet cites the Israeli legal organisation Yesh Din, which found that in 2025 some 67.6 per cent of recorded settler violence took place in Area C, the two-thirds of the West Bank under full Israeli military and civil control.
In 2026, by Yesh Din's count, 62.6 per cent of it has taken place in Areas B and A — the zones the Oslo agreements placed under Palestinian civil, and in Area A also Palestinian security, authority.
Yesh Din has mapped 26 outposts inside Area B, and puts the land settlers now effectively control across Areas B and A at about 100,000 dunams, roughly a hundred square kilometres.
That is the practical meaning of the shift for Palestinian readers. The tent on the hill was, for three decades, an Area C phenomenon that Palestinian officials could describe as someone else's jurisdiction. It is now inside the areas the Palestinian Authority is nominally responsible for, and neither the Authority's police nor the Israeli army is stopping it.
The army told Ynet that its forces operate to prevent law-breakers and to preserve what it called the fabric of life in the area.
What Washington has said#
The report also carries the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, whose language on the Qusra siege this month was the sharpest a US envoy in Tel Aviv has used about settler violence.
Defending his description of the men besieging the Qusra houses as Israeli terrorists, Huckabee said that under the American definition of terrorism, acts conducted so as to make people change their behaviour and fear for their lives are terror.
Times of Palestine has reported the Qusra siege since 9 August. Monday is day sixteen at Ras al-Ein, where a settlers' camp still stands over three houses of the Abu Rida and Hassan families and no lifting of the siege has been announced. Human Rights Watch counted 107 Palestinian communities emptied by settler violence since January 2023 in a report published on 20 August.
Ynet's own military correspondent, Elisha Ben Kimon, reported on Sunday that Israeli commanders describe the West Bank as slipping out of control and say the political level does not want to be entangled before the 27 October election. Shalom's investigation is the ground-level account of what that sentence costs.
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