Today Qusra, Tomorrow the West Bank: Israel’s New Plan Dalet
Israeli soldiers and Border Police officers standing in front of the besieged home in Qusra, behind water and food that Israeli solidarity activists attempted to deliver, 14 August 2026
Ramzy Baroud writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 27 August 2026:
If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus. The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.
While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.
Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba. The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities and expelling their inhabitants.
The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank. Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”
True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and land confiscation.
The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence — a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established. While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.
The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.
Now, back to Qusra.
Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town. They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside. The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists and journalists.
What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.