From hilltops to houses: A new phase of Israeli settlement expansion
Dalia Hatuqa writes in The New Arab on 22 September 2026:
On August 9, 2026, Israeli settlers surrounded three houses in the Ras al-Ain area of Qusra, a Palestinian village southeast of Nablus in the West Bank.
The settlers pitched a tent just outside the homes, then cut their power lines and broke their water pipes. Fifteen people were living in the homes, including at least two children, at the time of the attack. Alarmingly, a month later, the families remain trapped in their homes.
**** ****
Qusra has lived with settler violence for more than a decade. What happened in August 2026, however, differed from these previous acts of violence in one significant respect. In this case, the settlers came from an outpost right at the edge of the village itself.
Established in November 2025, the settler outpost lies within Area B, the region of the West Bank over which the Palestinian Authority (PA) formally holds civil jurisdiction. This time, the settlers deviated from their usual attacks on outlying farmlands and instead targeted homes and the people living inside them. The siege in Qusra is not simply an anomaly, but points to a dangerous escalation in Israeli settler activity in the West Bank.
For most of the past three decades, Israeli settlement expansion has been overwhelmingly concentrated in Area C, which is the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control. However, since October 2023, settlement activity has expanded into Area B – including places like Qusra – and, increasingly, into Area A. Israeli settlers no longer appear to limit their seizures to agricultural land and hilltops in the West Bank, as they did in the past. Now they are occupying Palestinian houses on the edge of villages.