Yousef Shanaran, 52, says settlers have besieged his family home in Wadi Rakhim, in the South Hebron Hills, around the clock since October 5. The family cannot leave the house on their own, not even to draw water from a well that Shanaran built beside it.
It took five days for the army to arrange the family’s access to the well. After running out of water three days earlier, the family was allowed on Tuesday to collect some.
A family house cut off from food and water
Shanaran built the two-storey house in 2016 on land between the Palestinian town of as-Samu and the village of Susiya, where he also planted about 70 grapevines and 30 to 40 olive trees. Speaking by phone, he said the family had no food left. “Food, there’s none,” he said.
He said the well was full but out of reach. “My well, full of water; I built it and lost money on it,” he said. “They keep me from it because they want to get me out of my house.”
According to Shanaran, settlers first pitched a tent about 300 metres from his home, which already restricted the family’s movement and exposed them to attacks and intimidation. On October 5, the tent was moved to just 30 metres from the house. The same day, about 50 settlers attacked the family with sticks and pepper spray, marking the start of the full siege.
Army permission controls every movement
Nasser Nawajeh, a longtime field researcher with the rights group B’Tselem who now heads the Susiya village council in Masafer Yatta, said he had tried to bring supplies to the family during the siege, but most attempts failed. “Once I tried to bring aid to the people, and right away there was an attack from the settlers,” he said.
Nothing can move in or out of the house without the army’s permission, according to both men. Nawajeh described this as a displacement policy. “If they want to take the kids out to school, we have to wait for the army to take them,” he said.
Shanaran said he has asked the army for coordination to deliver supplies since October 15, and has received excuses each time. “‘The army’s busy, can’t come, there aren’t any forces’ — they tell us ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’,” he said.
Nawajeh said the family now faces two forces: the settlers’ regional rapid response units, known in Hebrew as Kitat Konenut, and the regular army, which he said comes, demolishes the settlers’ tent and leaves. Once the soldiers are gone, the settlers pitch the tent again. Shanaran said the soldiers posted outside his home do nothing and simply sit and eat at the door.
Nawajeh said the house lies in Area B, which is technically under joint Israeli-Palestinian control, and that a closure order exists against the settlers, meaning the army could arrest them. “But there’s no enforcement of these laws,” he said. He added that the soldiers’ presence in effect gives the siege a green light, and that at times they do not stop settlers from approaching or hitting people.
Sieges spread to Umm Safa, Madama and Ras al-Ahmar
In Umm Safa, northwest of Ramallah, the Abayat family has lived in its home since 1973, before the nearby illegal settlement of Ateret was established, according to the village mayor, Marwan Sabah. Late in September, settlers pitched a tent at the family’s door and fixed a gate blocking the path to the house, where 15 people live. Sabah said the children cannot reach school and that the wife of Muhammad al-Abayat is ill and needs an operation. On October 20, the Israeli Civil Administration issued a demolition notice for the family home.
Sabah said anyone trying to reach the family is attacked or pepper-sprayed. The village won a court ruling and a police decision to open the gate, but he said the settlers lock it themselves most of the time. He described the situation for the wider village as a “suffocating siege” and said all of Umm Safa’s land, including the cemetery, is now under settler control.
In Madama, south of Nablus, lawyer Wail Qut of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center said settler outposts and an illegal settlement with a bypass road have surrounded the village. On October 12, the army sealed its three main entrances with earth mounds, the same day a weeklong siege of neighbouring Burin was lifted. Qut said a teacher was beaten by settlers while crossing on foot, and that two dialysis patients now face a much longer route to hospital.
On October 18, a bulldozer that villagers said came from the Yitzhar settlement shut the last road in use, uprooting nearby olive trees. Qut said the army’s District Coordination Office told the mayor the barriers would stay until farmers stopped going to their land during the olive harvest. On Tuesday the northern entrance reopened, but villagers reported that settlers attacked olive harvesters that evening, and the military sealed the entrance again the next day.
In Ras al-Ahmar, in the northern Jordan Valley, Israeli forces have sealed other access points and confiscated tractors and water tanks as the “Crimson Thread” barrier is built through the area. According to the Israeli group Jordan Valley Activists, another 11 families have left in the past two weeks, leaving about 20 of the 59 families who originally lived there. Local herder Thaer Bisharat said more than half the families had been displaced because of thirst.
Rights groups warn of wider displacement
Settlers have now built more than 400 outposts across the West Bank, isolating Palestinian homes and communities by controlling nearby hilltops and pathways. Dror Etkes, cofounder of the settlement-monitoring group Kerem Navot, said the doorstep sieges show an advanced collapse of any attempt to enforce the law in the West Bank.
Etkes said violence that once kept Palestinians off grazing land and farmland is now moving into built-up areas. He said that driving whole farming communities off their land in one move is still beyond settlers’ reach, but that they are trying to expel certain families living outside the main built-up clusters.
B’Tselem’s Yair Dvir said attacks like these occur continually across the West Bank. He said he believed the Qusra siege drew wide coverage because one of the Palestinians involved held US citizenship. Nawajeh warned that another wave of displacement may be under way. “It’s becoming something normal,” he said. “Every day dozens of settlers could take a Palestinian house and besiege it.”
Shanaran, speaking from his besieged home, described his situation in personal terms. “Imagine someone set an unjust enemy upon you, pitched a tent under your window, holding a grudge against you,” he said. “Every time you go out, he comes, beats you, or stops you. How would your life be?”
