On August 9, 2026, Israeli settlers surrounded three houses in the Ras al-Ain area of Qusra, a Palestinian village southeast of Nablus in the West Bank. The settlers pitched a tent just outside the homes, then cut their power lines and broke their water pipes. Fifteen people were living in the homes, including at least two children, at the time of the attack. Alarmingly, a month later, the families remain trapped in their homes.
One of the besieged houses belongs to Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American who runs a gas station and car wash business in Toledo, Ohio. He has spent nearly a million dollars building the home, though the project remains unfinished. From his Ohio home, he watched the settlers surround and attack his unfinished house in Ras al-Ain on the security cameras he had installed. Ridi has reached out to the US embassy for assistance, and the White House was reportedly in contact with the Israeli government regarding the situation. So far, nothing on the ground has changed.
Qusra has lived with settler violence for more than a decade. What happened in August 2026, however, differed from these previous acts of violence in one significant respect. In this case, the settlers came from an outpost right at the edge of the village itself. Established in November 2025, the settler outpost lies within Area B, the region of the West Bank over which the Palestinian Authority (PA) formally holds civil jurisdiction. This time, the settlers deviated from their usual attacks on outlying farmlands and instead targeted homes and the people living inside them. The siege in Qusra is not simply an anomaly, but points to a dangerous escalation in Israeli settler activity in the West Bank.
For most of the past three decades, Israeli settlement expansion has been overwhelmingly concentrated in Area C, which is the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control. However, since October 2023, settlement activity has expanded into Area B—including places like Qusra—and, increasingly, into Area A. Israeli settlers no longer appear to limit their seizures to agricultural land and hilltops in the West Bank, as they did in the past. Now they are occupying Palestinian houses on the edge of villages.
More than a failure of Israeli government enforcement or a wave of vigilantism, the recent escalation reflects implicit cooperation between the settlers and the Israeli state: settlers create facts on the ground, the military turns those facts into conditions that Palestinian residents cannot reverse, and the Israeli government legally seals the outcome. In practice, the systemic cooperation among these three forces accelerates the Israeli annexation of the West Bank, without any need for a formal policy declaration.
Beyond Area C
The 1993 Oslo Accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization divided the West Bank into three zones as a transitional measure before the PA would assume full control. Area A contained the main Palestinian cities and was directly under the PA; Area B was under the civil administration of the PA with Israeli security control; and Area C fell under full Israeli control.
After Oslo, Israeli settlements mostly expanded in Area C following a fairly consistent pattern. Existing settlements extended their boundaries through planning approvals and construction, while settlers independently established new outposts on surrounding hilltops and agricultural land. The Israeli government would then support these expansions with infrastructure and military protection, in some cases designating surrounding areas “state land,” restricting Palestinians’ access to their own property, and gradually bringing nearby grazing areas under settler control. Some outposts were later legalized as new settlements, or were retroactively folded into existing ones as “neighborhoods.” Yet although settlers took land around Palestinian communities, the outposts themselves were overwhelmingly kept inside Area C. This pattern intensified after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and crossed the geographic boundaries that had previously constrained settler activity.
This shift was enabled by the right-wing Israeli government that took office at the end of 2022, which placed political representatives of the settler movement in positions with direct authority over the West Bank. In February 2023, the Israeli government approved ten outposts in the West Bank and created a new category of “sites under legalization,” allowing other outposts to receive government funding and infrastructure support even though they were still unauthorized. That same month, the Israeli military-run Civil Administration transferred significant powers over settlement planning to a new Settlements Administration under the authority of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Since October 7, Israeli settlers have built 152 new outposts, at least 22 of them in Area B and at least one in Area A.
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli settlers have built 152 new outposts, at least 22 of them in Area B and at least one in Area A, on some 25,000 acres inside Areas A and B. As the outposts have multiplied, so has the number of settler attacks. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that in 2023, settlers carried out 1,291 attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank that caused injury or property damage. In 2024, the number of attacks increased to 1,449 and in 2025, jumped to 1,836. In 2026, OCHA estimates an average of six settler attacks are carried out every day across more than 275 communities in the West Bank, higher than in any year on record.
The village of Jalud in Area B illustrates this pattern of violent escalation. In 2023, Israeli settlers first took the land surrounding the village and then repeatedly attacked its residents. By 2026, the settlers were entering the residential edge of the village. One Palestinian house was occupied while still under construction. Another family endured weeks of settler violence, culminating in a siege during which settlers cut off the family’s water and electricity before brutally attacking them. The residents eventually escaped their homes, which settlers soon occupied.
The new strategy of settler expansion has reached Area A as well. On July 14, 2026, settlers took over a Palestinian house under construction in Beit Imrin, north of Nablus, in territory under full Palestinian Authority control. By the time of the attack, Israeli settler seizures of Palestinian houses were no longer isolated occurrences. Settlers have increasingly changed their targets from unfinished buildings to inhabited homes, such as those in Jalud and Qusra, taking dozens of Palestinian structures, in some cases after repeated attacks and sieges had forced the occupants to leave.
Although the number of houses seized by Israeli settlers in Areas A and B is small relative to the tens of thousands of acres they have taken across the West Bank, the expanding geographic scope and the trend toward seizing homes mark a turning point. The move toward taking Palestinian houses, in particular, effectively extends the Israeli frontier into the heart of the West Bank. Israel has already begun to use administrative reforms to register Palestinian land as Israeli property in Area C. What is happening in Areas A and B is a similar annexation pursued by occupancy rather than by statute; or put differently, de facto rather than de jure annexation.
The Qusra Timeline
The process of de facto annexation has unfolded in less than a year for the roughly 6,350 residents of the Palestinian village of Qusra, close to which Israeli settlers established an outpost in November 2025. Settlers reportedly built the outpost by taking over five unfinished Palestinian houses, then brought in tents, water tanks, and livestock. According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), settlers have escalated their attacks on the village ever since the outpost was created.
In May 2026, settlers began to attack Ras al-Ain on the outskirts of Qusra, which occupies high ground and offers a potential strategic advantage. The mayor of Qusra, Abdul Azim Wadi, counted eight separate attempts to establish a settler outpost there. On August 9, 2026, settlers surrounded local homes, cutting off food and water supplies to their 15 residents. On August 13, Israeli military forces arrived in Qusra ostensibly to end the settler siege and dismantle the unauthorized outposts. Instead, they declared the Ras al-Ain area around the occupied homes a closed military zone. Wadi reported that Israeli forces seized 16 Palestinian homes in Qusra, converted them into military posts, and ordered the residents of two of the besieged houses to leave, forcing them into the remaining building. They also turned back a group of Peace Now activists and Italian volunteers carrying food and water for the besieged Palestinians, though local residents said that they allowed around 15 settlers to enter the village despite the closure. Israeli soldiers permitted limited food to reach the besieged families, but blocked a water tanker. Israeli forces also detained several settlers who were among those attacking PA municipal workers trying to repair the severed water and electricity lines. Israeli forces were filmed praying alongside the settlers rather than removing them, though the Israeli army later claimed that it had disciplined those soldiers. At the time of publication, Palestinian families were still trapped inside the siege.
A Division of Labor
On August 13, 2026, Ophir Falk, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, described the settlers at Qusra as “vigilantes” and said that such incidents were only sporadic. Aryeh Eldad, a West Bank settler and former member of the Israeli Knesset, argued that these kinds of attacks happen outside of state authority. In a narrow sense, their claims are defensible. No Israeli minister specifically selected Ridi’s house to be occupied or issued orders for the siege. But the settler strategy for annexing land in the West Bank does not depend on a single chain of command or clear policy decisions. Israeli settlers, the military, politicians, and non-government institutions operate independently, yet their actions reinforce one another and collectively support settlement expansion.
The settler strategy for annexing land does not depend on a single chain of command or clear policy decisions
Settlers may choose where to move, for example, but they do not build outposts on their own. Amana, the settlement movement’s development organization, had reportedly established more than 30 farms in the West Bank by February 2021, and in June 2023, its secretary-general, Zeev Hever, said that agricultural farms occupied more than twice the area of all settlements combined. Legally, Amana is a private cooperative association, not a government agency. But in practice, it has long operated within the broader framework of the Israeli state. The Israeli government’s West Bank regional councils have transferred tens of millions of shekels in public money to the organization, and Amana has also appeared as a party to land-allocation agreements with the Settlement Division of the government-funded World Zionist Organization.
The Israeli military can then turn unauthorized settlements into protected areas. As was the case in Qusra, by creating closed military zones—often under the guise of removing settlers—Israeli forces can bar Palestinian owners from returning to an area, leaving the settler presence effectively undisturbed without officially transferring ownership of the land. The result is an ostensibly temporary measure that produces new facts on the ground.
How Israeli Law “Legalizes” Settler Seizures
The State of Israel can give formal recognition to such unauthorized outposts. On February 8, 2026, the Israeli security cabinet widened the reach of Israeli administrative authority in the West Bank, expanding the Israeli Civil Administration’s enforcement powers inside Areas A and B, publishing previously classified land registries, repealing the Jordanian-era prohibition on non-Arab land purchase, abolishing transaction licenses, and transferring authority over building permits for the Israeli settlement in Hebron from the Palestinian municipality to the Civil Administration’s Higher Planning Council. The Yesha Council—the umbrella organization for Jewish settlements in the West Bank—called the package one of “the most significant decisions” since the 1967 War. The United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, condemned the move as yet another step toward the permanent Israeli annexation of the West Bank. In March 2026, the government secretly used its expanded powers to approve more than 30 additional outposts and farms in the West Bank.
Conclusion
The full scale of settler and military incursions into Areas A and B is difficult to measure because international monitoring does not treat them as a distinct category. Both OCHA and OHCHR track settler violence but do not systematically separate incursions from Areas A and B from those in Area C. Without such differentiation, it is difficult for independent observers to quantify the most consequential changes underway in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, the reports already show a clear pattern in which Israeli settlers are effectively making dispossession permanent by seizing houses rather than fields. Albanese has said that Israel is “using [settlers] to advance ethnic cleansing.” Local Palestinian residents are being forcibly displaced without the need for an expulsion order or demolition permit.
The Trump administration has largely framed settler violence as a problem of individual perpetrators, echoing the language of Israeli officials. But this characterization misses the vast network of actors and government institutions that supports the outposts. Washington should address this gap by targeting the financing and construction of settler outposts, not just individual settlers. Sanctioning such groups is not a new idea. Under Executive Order 14115, issued by President Biden in February 2024, the United States sanctioned violent settlers and the organizations behind them, including Amana. On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump revoked the order, and four days later, the US Department of the Treasury removed the resulting designations. The US should now restore these sanctions against settler groups.
In the meantime, the Israeli outpost overlooking Qusra remains standing as the military refuses to carry out eviction orders against settlers there. The siege on Palestinian homes has entered its fifth week and the families inside are still trapped. Their fate will indicate whether the seizure of Palestinian homes remains an exceptional tactic or becomes an established instrument of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: MOSAB SHAWER / MIDDLE EAST IMAGES / MIDDLE EAST IMAGES VIA AFP/p>
