Settler Violence Spreads: From a Single House to an Entire Village Under Siege in the West Bank

For more than two weeks, the family of Yousef Shanaran, 52, in Wadi Rakhim — a once-quiet limestone area of the South Hebron Hills — has been surrounded day and night by tents pitched by Israeli settlers. They cannot leave on their own, not even to draw water from the well he built beside his home.

It took five days for the Israeli army to coordinate access to the well. After running out of water three days earlier, the family was allowed to bring back a small amount on Tuesday. Shanaran said there is no food left in the house. The two-storey stone home was built in 2016 on land between the town of as-Samu and the village of Susiya, surrounded by about 70 grapevines and 30 to 40 olive trees.

"My well is full of water. I built it and paid for it. They won't let me near it because they want to push me out of my home," he said by phone.

More than six months ago, settlers set up a tent about 300 metres from Shanaran's house, restricting movement and exposing the family to attacks and threats. On 5 October, the tent was moved to within 30 metres of the home. The same day, about 50 settlers attacked the family with sticks and pepper spray. That was the start of a full siege.

'A siege the army does not acknowledge'

Nasser Nawajeh, a veteran field researcher for the Israeli rights group B'Tselem and now head of the Susiya village council in Masafer Yatta, has repeatedly tried to deliver supplies to the Shanaran family, mostly without success. "Once I tried to bring aid and was attacked by settlers immediately. They are there 24 hours a day to attack," he said.

According to Nawajeh, nothing can enter or leave the Shanaran home without army approval. "This is a policy of expulsion. To get children to school you have to wait for the army to take them. To bring in food or water, you have to coordinate."

Since 15 October, he has asked the army repeatedly to coordinate deliveries but has received a different excuse each day: "The army is busy, can't come, has no forces" — and always the promise of "tomorrow, tomorrow".

Two forces are applying pressure, according to Nawajeh: settler regional units known as Kitat Konenut (Hebrew for rapid response teams) and the regular army. The army "comes, dismantles the settlers' tents and leaves"; once the soldiers withdraw, the settlers put the tents back up.

Shanaran said the soldiers stationed outside his home do nothing. "They stand and sit, eat and relax right at the door of the house." Nawajeh said the soldiers' presence is effectively a green light for the siege to continue. "At times the soldiers don't even stop settlers from coming close; they beat people and then sit with the soldiers at the door."

The house is in Area B, nominally under joint Israeli-Palestinian administration, so the army could arrest the settlers behind the closure order against them. "But there is no enforcement of these laws," Nawajeh said.

In his view, the soldiers outside the home see their job as shielding the family from beatings rather than ending the closure. "In practice, the Palestinians are living in an inner prison. A siege is basically a prison."

Shanaran said being confined to the house is worse than prison. "Prison has an end date. Here you sit in your own home and are locked inside it — and you are afraid."

'If they can push out the first house, they can push out the second'

According to Nawajeh, Shanaran's home is the closest Palestinian house to the encroaching settler outposts. Settlers make no distinction between Area A (nominally under Palestinian control), Area B (joint) and Area C (full Israeli military and civilian control). "They start with the house on the edge, on the corner. If they can push out the first house, they can push out the second."

The tactic is being applied in Masafer Yatta, an area of the southern occupied West Bank that is regularly targeted by settler and Israeli army attacks.

Similar sieges have taken place in Jalud in the north, where the Tubasi family was forced out of their home in July and attacked in September when they tried to return under a court order, and in Qusra, where settlers besieged three homes, one belonging to a US citizen, before the army set up a base beside the surrounded houses.

B'Tselem's Yair Dvir said the Qusra siege drew wide attention because one of the Palestinians involved holds US citizenship. "In practice, attacks like these happen constantly across the West Bank."

According to figures cited, settlers have established more than 400 outposts across the West Bank, isolating Palestinian homes and communities by controlling nearby hilltops and roads.

Dror Etkes, co-founder of the settlement monitoring group Kerem Navot, said that with Palestinians already besieged, encirclements at their doorsteps reflect "an advanced stage of the total collapse of the rule of law, of any effort to enforce the law in the West Bank".

According to Etkes, violence that once kept Palestinians from grazing and farming open land is gradually moving into residential areas. Expelling entire farming communities from the land at once remains beyond the settlers' reach, but "what they are trying to do now is expel individual families… living outside the large population clusters".

Umm Safa: a gate and a demolition order

On the eastern edge of the farming village of Umm Safa, northwest of Ramallah, stands the home of Muhammad al-Abayat. According to mayor Marwan Sabah, the family has lived there since 1973, before the nearby illegal settlement of Ateret was established. The house now sits between Ateret and one of six outposts surrounding the village.

In late September, Israeli settlers pitched tents at the door of the home and then installed a gate blocking the entrance to the property where 15 people live. Children cannot get to school, and al-Abayat's wife is ill and needs surgery. "Even his children are barred; the family can barely get basic supplies," Sabah said. Anyone who tries to approach the family is attacked or pepper-sprayed.

The village won a court ruling and a police decision on opening the gate, but "most of the time the settlers lock it themselves", according to Sabah. The mayor said the entire village faces a "suffocating siege", with illegal outposts ringing it and the army backing them. "Today all of Umm Safa's land is under settler control, including the village cemetery." At harvest time, "all the olives are in their hands". Even basic services have become impossible: "All the rubbish — we can't get it out."

As the settler siege continued, on 20 October Israel's Civil Administration issued a demolition notice for the Abayat family's home.

Madama: entrances sealed with earth mounds

In Madama, south of Nablus, settler outposts in Area B to the north and west, together with an illegal settlement and a bypass road to the south, have encircled the village. On 12 October, the army blocked all three main entrances with earth mounds. The same day, a week-long siege on the neighbouring village of Burin was lifted.

Villagers, including teachers, women and children, were forced to scramble over the mounds quickly while two cars waited on either side, according to Wail Qut, a Madama resident and lawyer with the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre (JLAC), which is challenging before Israel's Supreme Court a new Area B outpost near the village. He said a teacher was beaten by settlers as she tried to cross, and two kidney patients now face a much longer journey to the hospital where they receive regular treatment.

On 18 October, a bulldozer villagers attribute to the illegal Yitzhar settlement blocked the last remaining road — a secondary route toward Asira al-Qibliya — and uprooted olive trees nearby. According to Qut, the army's District Coordination Office told the mayor the barriers would remain until "farmers do not come to their land [during the olive harvest], especially in the north", where the settler outpost in question is located.

"I have lived here all my life, and this has never happened in Madama," Qut said after the secondary road was blocked. "The settlers are seizing a golden opportunity. There is no deterrence from the Israeli government… they are just trying to do as much as they can before the Israeli elections."

By Tuesday, the last northern entrance had been reopened. But villagers said that night settlers from the Area B outpost attacked olive pickers near the village entrance. The next day, the army sealed the entrance again, while more olive trees were filmed being destroyed. Residents say the siege is continuing.

Different stages of the same pressure

Last week, settlers east of Jerusalem strung barbed wire around the Bedouin communities of al-Tabna and al-Muhtawish, near Khan al-Ahmar. Suleiman Ali Salem al-Arab, known as Abu Ra'id, said their livestock are penned in and there is no grazing land; a five-minute trip to the nearby road now takes an hour. Settlers are driving stakes to fence the communities in. "They put it between the houses and lock people in so they can push them out," Abu Ra'id said.

In Ras al-Ahmar, in the northern Jordan Valley, the siege has come close to full displacement. Israeli forces have blocked other access routes and confiscated tractors and water tanks as the "Crimson Thread" fence was built through the area.

According to Israel's Jordan Valley Activists group, 11 more families have left in the past two weeks, leaving only about 20 of the 59 families that once lived there. "More than half the families have been displaced by thirst," said Thaer Bisharat, a local herder. "We fast as if it were Ramadan, and the sheep are like camels."

As settler sieges multiply — enabled by the army and ultimately replaced by it — Nawajeh fears a new wave of Palestinian displacement is under way. "It is becoming normal," he said. "Every day, dozens of settlers can take over a Palestinian home and besiege it."

From his besieged home, Shanaran said: "Imagine someone sets an unjust enemy upon you, pitches a tent under your window, nurses a grudge against you. Every time you go out, he comes, beats you or blocks you. What would your life be like?"