The UN human rights office (OHCHR) appealed to Israeli authorities to assist Palestinian families it says have been confined to their homes for days by Israeli settlers, amid what it described as an intensifying campaign to seize their land in the occupied West Bank.
According to OHCHR, three Palestinian families, including at least two children, have been trapped without electricity or water, and in what the agency called “a state of terror”, in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus.
Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN human rights office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told UN News the families had been moved into a single home, which he said remained surrounded by Israeli settlers. He said the Israeli military was “either unable or unwilling” to protect Palestinian communities, as he said it is required to do under the Geneva Convention, or, he suggested, was colluding with settlers in a campaign aimed at displacing Palestinians and seizing their land.
Mr Sunghay said around 20 Palestinian families from Qusra had been evacuated by Israeli soldiers, ostensibly for security reasons, and stressed the need for urgent international assistance to address what he called an increasingly dangerous situation in the territory.
The West Bank has been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It remains central to proposals for a future Palestinian state, though the expansion of Israeli settlements — considered illegal under international law by most of the international community, a position Israel disputes — is widely seen as a growing obstacle to a negotiated two-state solution.
