Reacting to the siege of three Palestinian families’ homes by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra, southeast of Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank, Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, said:
“The horrors unfolding in Qusra are far from an isolated incident. They reflect the relentless escalation and expansion of an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel, with the aim of displacing Palestinians across the occupied West Bank.
“The three families under siege have been threatened, harassed and attacked by Israeli settlers from nearby outposts for several months. They have been confined to their homes since Sunday August 9, are running out of food, and lack access to basic necessities, including running water. The homes targeted in these attacks are located in Area B of the West Bank, supposedly under Palestinian administrative control and Israeli military control, according to the classification of the Oslo Accords. Yet Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances trying to deliver food and water to the homes were also attacked by settlers. Despite these violent attacks, Israeli forces allowed the settlers to remain close proximity to the Palestinian families’ homes.
“For far too long, the world has ignored the immense, unfathomable suffering of Palestinians being uprooted and erased from land they have inhabited for generations. The international community must stop treating such incidents as ‘isolated’ and instead hold Israel accountable.”
Sources in Qusra told Amnesty International that the Israeli military forced two of the besieged families, in addition to six neighboring families, to evacuate their homes for several hours on Thursday and used them as military outposts. As one resident put it, “instead of removing the attackers, the Israeli forces removed the attacked families, while allowing the settlers to stay all this time.”
“Israel, as the occupying power, has a legal obligation to protect the Palestinian population under its control and not to stand by or worse, stand with settlers – while they lay siege to Palestinian homes and cut off families’ access to healthcare, electricity and water for days on end,”
“States must end any form of direct and indirect support for Israel’s unlawful occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and its brutal system of apartheid, including its illegal settlement enterprise. This includes banning trade and investment that contribute to the maintenance of Israeli settlements, as well as ending any cooperation and assistance to entities and individuals involved in the settlement enterprise. States should also show no further hesitation in imposing targeted sanctions on senior Israeli officials allegedly responsible for international crimes, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid, and forcible transfer of Palestinians in the unlawfully occupied West Bank. It is imperative that States demonstrate unequivocal resolve by increasing protective measures for Palestinian communities at risk of displacement and using all their diplomatic and political leverage to secure the return of forcibly displaced Palestinians to their homes. Failure to act would further embolden Israel and state-backed Israeli settlers to continue their unlawful and violent actions against Palestinians, who are left unprotected and without any recourse to justice.”
Background information
In June, Amnesty International published the report “Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of West Bank Bedouin and herding communities”, which exposed how the Israeli government has made formal annexation an explicit policy objective. It is implementing the settler movement’s religious nationalist agenda, it has accelerated settlement expansion and land grabs, increased financial and logistical support to settlements, and it has armed settlers, thereby enabling a brutal state-sanctioned campaign of settler violence and of forced displacement of Palestinians from Area C of the West Bank. Recent raids, such as the attacks on Tell and ongoing attacks on Taybeh and Qusra, among others, show that such unlawful actions extend beyond Area C and are not limited to Bedouin and herding communities.
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