Besieged by Israeli settlers and cut off from the outside world, Palestinian families on a West Bank hilltop refuse to leave
The Ras al-Ain hill outside the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, where several families have been besieged in their homes by Israeli settler, August 2026
Shatha Hammad reports in Mondoweiss on 21 August 2026:
On a large rock under the midday summer sun, Abdul Karim Hassan, 63, sat exhausted by fatigue and grief, staring the whole time toward his two sons’ houses on the hill of Ras al-Ain in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus in the central West Bank. A few meters from the walls of three Palestinian homes in the town, settlers pitched a tent on August 9, 2026, and began besieging the Palestinian families in the area to force them out of their homes.
This was only the latest escalation in the series of attacks that settlers have waged on Ras al-Ain for seven months — cutting off electricity and water lines, repeatedly assaulting residents in their homes, trying to break in and burn them, setting ambushes along the road, attacking the homeowners as they moved through the area, and even attempting to kill them.
The settler-instigated siege on Qusra comes less than a month after the family of Mahmoud al-Tubasi was driven from their two homes in the village of Jalud, south of Nablus, on July 22, after which Israeli settlers seized the properties.
It is part of a broader state-backed Israeli campaign, with settlers at its head, to push Palestinians out of areas slated for future settlement expansion, which not only encompass the 60% of the West Bank falling under full Israeli control classified as “Area C” under the Oslo Accords, but has also increasingly included the 22% of the territory under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), known as Area B.
A report by Human Rights Watch published on August 20, 2026, found that settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have driven the full or partial displacement of 107 towns and villages since January 2023, alongside unprecedented settlement expansion. A report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) further found that the number of Palestinians forcibly displaced by settler attacks and demolition and eviction operations in the first four months of this year already exceeds the total recorded for all of 2025.