Israeli occupiers using violence, intimidation to drive Palestinians from West Bank homes: Ynet

Israeli occupiers are increasingly using siege tactics, violence and intimidation to expel Palestinians from their homes and land in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s Ynet news portal reported Monday. The recent siege of a Palestinian home in the West Bank town of Qusra -- which drew international attention -- was “far from an isolated case,” Ynet reported, adding that Israeli youths from illegal settlement outposts regularly block access to Palestinian villages and pressure residents to leave. Within the past two weeks, Israeli occupiers, often protected by Israeli military personnel, have surrounded three Palestinian homes in Qusra, into which they have prevented the delivery of basic necessities, according to Ynet. In the village of Jalud near Nablus, Mahmoud and Aida Tubasi said they had left their homes after months of threats, arson, stone-throwing and roadblocks by Israeli occupiers. “No water, no flour, no rice [was allowed into the village],” Mahmoud Tubasi told Ynet. “We knew it was over, and we left.” According to the report, the Tubasi family can still see their homes from the nearby residence to which they were forced to flee. Tubasi said the occupiers had doused the doors of their homes with fuel before setting them alight, erected a structure nearby, threw stones, played loud music at night and threatened the family. “They told us, ‘We will burn you like the Dawabshe family,’” he said, referring to a 2015 arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma that killed an 18-month-old Palestinian child and seriously injured his parents and four-year-brother. Both parents later died of their injuries, while the surviving child suffered burns on 60 percent of his body and is now living under the care of relatives. According to Ynet, the case is part of a wider pattern of violence by Israeli occupiers, who set up outposts inside areas nominally under Palestinian administration before waging campaigns of intimidation and violence against local Palestinians with the aim of driving them from their homes and land. Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement group, said 26 occupier outposts had been established in Areas A and B of the occupied West Bank, where occupiers have seized control of approximately 100,000 dunams (roughly 25,000 acres) of land. Yesh Din, another Israeli rights group, said more than 60 percent of the occupier violence it had documented in the first half of 2026 occurred in Areas A and B. Last year, it added, roughly one third of all documented incidents were concentrated in Area C. “The deeper the settlement, the deeper the violence,” Yesh Din research director Yonatan Kanonich told Ynet. Documented incidents include beatings, stone-throwing, Molotov cocktails, gunfire, and arson attacks on homes, vehicles and agricultural crops. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee recently used unusually strong language to describe such attacks, saying: “When you engage in activity designed to create fear in an individual, a society or a community, that is the dictionary definition of terrorism.” Ynet said similar accounts had emerged from other Palestinian communities, including Jaljulia north of Ramallah, where residents said the establishment of a settlement outpost 10 months ago had turned a previously quiet area into the scene of repeated attacks by occupiers. Jaljulia residents said armed occupiers had trespassed on farmland, damaged crops and threatened agricultural workers with violence. The West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C under the 1995 Oslo II Accord. Area A is under Palestinian administrative and security control, Area B is under Palestinian administrative and Israeli security control, and Area C -- which accounts for roughly 60 percent of the entire West Bank -- is under full Israeli control.