Israeli Press
Ynet's Oded Shalom warns Qusra will blow up in Israel's face
Running file The Qusra File DAY 25 →
Image credit: Qusra, Nablus governorate — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Oded Shalom, a senior writer at the Israeli news site Ynet, set out this week to reach the house of the Abu Rida family below the outpost at Qusra and got as far as a Border Police checkpoint on the hillside trail. Three white pickups and two brown jeeps blocked the path; the soldiers questioned him and eventually let him through.
His report, published on Thursday under the headline that the attempt to reach the besieged house had failed and that "what is happening in the West Bank will blow up in our faces," is the fullest account in the Hebrew press of the siege's twenty-fifth day.
What Shalom found#
Louay Abu Rida, an American citizen, and his family have lived surrounded since settlers put up a sukkah outside their home on 9 August and the army declared the area a closed military zone, Shalom wrote. In his telling the closure did not remove the settlers; it fixed the family in place while the hilltop stayed occupied.
The army told him it has deployed reinforced forces to prevent friction and has coordinated eight entries to the house over two weeks, and that the closed zone protects the residents.
Shalom's own argument, set against that statement, is that Qusra shows a system rather than an incident. He quoted the village imam, Ziad Uda: "Every day pushes people to the edge. There is a threshold for suffering. Settlers harm people, the government sides with them, the army sides with them."
The figures Shalom gathered from the village: forty young men jailed since the attacks began, seventy per cent of Qusra's farmland lost to settlements over the years, four houses burned completely and seven partially, eighteen vehicles destroyed.
Why it matters that an Israeli wrote it#
The piece appeared on the day police made the file's first arrest, a 19-year-old settler held over Saturday's attack. Shalom's warning is addressed to an Israeli readership and framed in terms of Israel's own safety, the register in which the Hebrew press usually reaches the occupied West Bank.
Ynet carried the army's position in full beside his. This paper's own reporting on Qusra since 11 August has recorded the same siege from the family's side; Shalom's is the first Hebrew-language attempt to reach the house that this desk has seen.
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