Israeli forces seize Palestinian homes after siege of West Bank village

Israeli military forces have seized Palestinian homes in Qusra days after besieging the village in the occupied West Bank.

Reports said that the occupation soldiers took over eight Palestinian homes in Qusra in Nablus governorate on Thursday.

Later, the reports added, the regime’s troops relinquished six but forced two Palestinian families to leave their besieged homes.

The siege of Qusra began on Sunday, when Israeli settlers and forces set up a tent blocking the entrance to three homes on the edge of the village, severing water and electricity supplies and preventing an ambulance from reaching a sick toddler.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning the settlers for carrying out “systematic assaults that can only be described as terroristic”.

It also said that the Tel Aviv regime is using the settlers as an “unchecked tool to implement its criminal policies” of forced displacement and annexation of the occupied West Bank.

Meanwhile, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said, “These criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the Occupying Power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave their homes and their land.”

Palestinians in the West Bank have been subjected to escalating Israeli military actions and settler violence, amid the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip that has killed over 73,000 people in the coastal territory since October 2023.

Since then, Israeli forces and illegal settlers have killed at least 1,182 Palestinians across the West Bank, injured thousands, and abducted around 24,000, according to official Palestinian figures.

In another development on Thursday, Israeli politicians and settlers held a ceremony to celebrate their return to the Ganim settlement on Palestinian-owned land east of Jenin city in the West Bank.

The re-establishment of the illegal settlement took place 21 years after it was evacuated as part of Israel’s 2005 disengagement plan.

Israeli minister of military affairs Israel Katz, who attended the event, said, “Here, we are staying forever.”

Tareq Ighbariyeh, the settlement affairs official in Jenin governorate, told the Palestinian WAFA news agency that the colonists’ return to Ganim represents a dangerous development that would redraw the geopolitical map of Jenin governorate and impose new facts on the ground.

The international community considers these settlements illegal under international law and the Geneva Conventions due to their construction on occupied land.

The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in multiple resolutions.

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