From inside his home in the West Bank town of Qusra, Qusai Abu Rida watched Friday as Israeli settlers moved from a tent they had erected in front of his house down to the valley below — rather than returning to the outpost where they live. [1] Even with Israeli soldiers positioned around his home and those of two neighboring families, the settlers stayed close enough that he expects them back once the troops leave. The siege of three homes began Sunday when dozens of settlers blocked the doors and prevented anyone inside from leaving. [1] It is now in its sixth day.
The paper's Thursday file recorded the settler clock running in Taybeh, where closed zones and intimidation followed the same rhythm. Qusra is the same method with a longer fuse. The army removes the settlers; the settlers return; the army removes them again. Ziv Stahl, executive director of the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, called it a kids' game, cat and mouse — clearly not a matter of capability but a matter of will. [1] The distinction is the entire indictment. A state that could clear the road and does not has made a choice.
Friday brought the first outside resupply. Activists from Israel and other countries marched through the occupied West Bank carrying food and water to the besieged families, whose supplies had been dwindling since Sunday. [2] Israeli forces threatened to use tear gas against the marchers and forced them to leave, according to Itamar Weil of the activist group Bnei Avraham, even as the settlers remained in the valley below town. [1] The priority ordering is recorded in that sentence alone: the army cleared the people bringing bread and left the people blocking doors.
The house Abu Rida defends belongs to his brother — Loui Ridi, who spells the family name differently and lives in Toledo, Ohio, making this one of the sieges with an American address attached to it. [1] Ridi has watched the standoff on security cameras since it began, until the cameras went offline Thursday. He told the Associated Press he plans to fly to the West Bank next week to deliver food and do whatever he can to protect his brother and the house. His ask is modest and un-American in its resignation: resolved and permanent, not just for a couple of days. [1]
The official responses form their own file. Israel's military declared the village — roughly ten miles from Nablus — a closed military zone, a designation that seals witnesses out along with everything else. [1] Both the military and the police referred questions about enforcement to each other, the administrative equivalent of the cat-and-mouse game playing out on the hillside. [1] Defense Minister Israel Katz instructed the army to prepare a plan to transfer responsibility for civilian matters to the police, which rights groups read as another layer between settlers and any authority willing to remove them. [2]
Qusra sits inside a larger curve. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territory captured in 1967 where the international community overwhelmingly considers settlements illegal. [1] Under Netanyahu's government, Israel has approved more than one hundred new settlements, and extremist settler groups routinely enter Palestinian towns to clash with villagers and burn homes, mosques and cars. [1] The prime minister, courting ultranationalist blocs ahead of an expected October election, dismisses concern about settler violence as overblown and attributes it to fringe youths. Rights groups answer with the enforcement record: attackers are rarely punished, and the army's own conduct at Qusra — tear gas threats aimed at activists — suggests why. [1]
The war next door supplies both cover and contrast. Since February 28, the region's attention, and most of the American political calendar, has belonged to the Strait of Hormuz. Settler violence has accelerated in that shadow, wave after wave documented by the UN and Israeli groups alike. A village of stone houses ten miles from Nablus cannot trend against an aircraft carrier. But the ledger of what this government does at home while its allies look away is being written in places like Qusra regardless of readership.
What happens after the troops withdraw is the whole test, and the pattern so far is unambiguous: Abu Rida expects the tent back at his door because every previous withdrawal has returned it. [1] An occupation's daily truth lives in that expectation. Three families are still inside their homes, supplied now by marchers who risked gas to reach them, defended by nothing but the fact that cameras are watching and one brother in Ohio is counting days until his flight lands. A village that outlasts the siege still loses if the siege becomes the normal. That is the sixth day's full account.
-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem