The siege of Qusra has entered its second phase, and the second phase is worse than the first. For days, Jewish settlers surrounded the homes of Palestinian families in this village south of Nablus, cut them off, and held them inside. Then the American ambassador called the settlers terrorists. Then the army arrived. And the army did not end the siege. It ordered the families to leave their own homes, and it took up positions inside them.
The sequence matters, because it answers the question that was being asked all week: what would Washington’s words actually change? On Wednesday, Mike Huckabee, America’s envoy in Israel and a man who has spent decades defending the settlement project, looked at a group of settlers besieging Palestinian homes and called them Israeli terrorists. The word terror coming from this particular ambassador was the most remarkable statement of the week, precisely because he is the settler movement’s most powerful friend in Washington. The world waited to see what followed.
What followed was the Israeli military. Locals describe the access to the besieged homes as tighter than before, and soldiers have taken up positions inside the houses. The families have been ordered to evacuate. At one site, security forces withdrew and about a dozen settlers remained, according to reports, with two families still inside. The picture is no longer settlers against families with the army watching. It is settlers against families with the army now holding the doors.
One of those doors belongs to Americans. The house at the center of the standoff is owned by Lou Ridi, a Palestinian American living in Ohio, whose brother and teenage nephew were trapped inside for days with no food or water. That is the fact that makes this story land in Washington at all: an American citizen’s home under siege in the occupied West Bank, and the American ambassador’s response was a statement on X. The statement was strong. It was also all there was.
The army’s move does not look like a response to Huckabee’s words. It looks like the opposite. The ambassador said the settlers were committing an act of terror. The army answered by turning the families’ homes into the army’s positions. The siege by settlers is being completed by soldiers, which is a way of saying that the state has absorbed the settlers’ goal and given it a uniform.
The wider picture is unchanged and worse. The Israeli military is simultaneously conducting raids in Jenin, where access to aid has been blocked, and the surge in settler violence across the West Bank has continued through the year. The pattern in Qusra is the pattern everywhere: settlers attack, the army arrives, and the Palestinians are told to leave. The army dismantled two illegal outposts near Qusra last week, which looked like enforcement, but the evacuation orders this week look like something else. It is hard to read the two together as anything but a message: the outposts go, the land stays, and the people go with it.
The question now is whether Washington means anything it says. The United States funds the Israeli military and shields Israel diplomatically. It has leverage of a kind no other country has. Huckabee’s statement proved the administration can see what is happening in Qusra. The evacuation orders prove that seeing is not the same as stopping it. If the most pro-Israel ambassador in American history can call settlers terrorists and the army still moves into the homes, then the vocabulary of American policy has changed while the substance has not.
The families in Qusra did not need Huckabee’s word terror to know what was happening to them. They have lived it for months, and now they are being ordered out of the houses they were defending. The settlers who started this are still there, in some cases a dozen of them at the gate. The soldiers are inside. The ambassador has spoken. The siege goes on.
Sources: Al Jazeera, AP, BBC, NBC News, France 24