Settlers From New Outpost Besiege Three Qusra Homes, Cut Power and Water for a Month

On August 9, 2026, Israeli settlers pitched a tent outside three houses in the Ras al-Ain area of Qusra, a village southeast of Nablus, then cut the power lines and broke the water pipes serving them. Fifteen people, including at least two children, were living inside. More than a month later, according to The New Arab, the families remain trapped.

One of the besieged houses belongs to Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American who owns a gas station and car wash in Toledo, Ohio. Ridi has spent nearly a million dollars building the home, which is still unfinished. He watched settlers surround it through security cameras he had installed, and has since contacted the U.S. embassy for help. The White House was reportedly in touch with the Israeli government about the situation. As of this reporting, nothing on the ground has changed.

Qusra has endured settler violence for more than a decade, but this incident broke from the usual pattern in one respect: the settlers came from an outpost established at the village's edge in November 2025, sitting inside Area B, the zone where the Palestinian Authority formally holds civil jurisdiction under the Oslo Accords. Rather than raiding outlying farmland, as in past attacks, settlers this time encircled homes and the people inside them.

A Boundary That No Longer Holds

For most of the three decades since Oslo divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, Israeli settlement expansion concentrated almost entirely in Area C, the 60 percent of the territory under full Israeli control. Outposts rose on hilltops and grazing land, later folded into existing settlements or legalized outright, while the outposts themselves stayed inside Area C's boundary.

"Since October 2023, settlement activity has expanded into Area B... and, increasingly, into Area A," The New Arab reports, describing outposts built at the edge of villages rather than on remote farmland.

The New Arab documents that this shift accelerated after the right-wing government seated at the end of 2022 handed settler-movement figures direct authority over West Bank planning. In February 2023, the Israeli government approved ten new outposts and created a category called "sites under legalization," while the military's Civil Administration transferred settlement planning powers to a new Settlements Administration under Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Since October 7, 2023, according to figures cited in the report, settlers have built 152 new outposts, at least 22 of them in Area B and at least one in Area A, across roughly 25,000 acres.

The New Arab's analysis frames the pattern as a three-part mechanism: settlers create facts on the ground, the military converts those facts into conditions Palestinian residents cannot reverse, and the government legally seals the outcome, all without a formal annexation declaration. The Qusra siege, on this account, is not an isolated act of vigilantism but a demonstration of that mechanism reaching into territory the Oslo framework had assigned to Palestinian civil control.

The families in Ras al-Ain remain without reliable power or water. No Israeli authority has publicly commented on the outpost's status or on ending the siege.