QUSRA, West Bank – For three days, Ruqaya Hassan woke before dawn to the sound of stones striking the walls of her home. “Just like the sound of bullets,” she said. Beyond her front door, dozens of Israeli settlers had blocked the only road into the village, cutting off water and electricity for her family and two neighboring households, among them the home of a Palestinian-American man and his teenage son.
The siege of Qusra, a farming village south of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, ended Thursday when Israeli soldiers evacuated the trapped families under heavy pressure from Washington. But it was the words chosen by the United States ambassador, Mike Huckabee, that drew wider attention, an unusually blunt denunciation from a diplomat who has rarely broken with Israel’s governing coalition over its conduct in the West Bank.
“Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting,” Huckabee wrote in a post on X. His office went further, describing the perpetrators as “Israeli terrorists,” a term that American officials have almost never applied to Jewish settlers operating in occupied territory.
The condemned settlers had erected tents and boulders around the home of Qusai Ridi, a Palestinian-American dual citizen, and two surrounding houses on Sunday, blocking the entrance and preventing the occupants from leaving. His teenage son, Ahmed, was inside when the siege began. Hassan, 28, who lived in an adjacent home, fled with her daughters but left her husband behind to defend the property.
The attack did not come without warning. Two and a half weeks earlier, Israeli settlers burned the mosque in Qusra, spray-painting the walls with a message: “The land of Israel is redeemed with blood. Revenge.” That arson was part of a pattern documented long before the siege. The United Nations counted more than 1,400 settler incidents across 260 Palestinian communities in 2026 alone, with at least 3,800 Palestinians displaced and more than 75 killed, Al Jazeera reported.
Israeli forces eventually responded, deploying tear gas to disperse the settlers and reinforcing the area with an additional battalion. Soldiers dismantled an illegal outpost constructed nearby and evacuated the Ridi family early Thursday morning. Yet when the operation concluded, settlers remained visible along the road outside the property, and no arrest warrants for those who organized the siege had been issued.
Huckabee’s statement landed with unusual force because of his record. An evangelical pastor and former Arkansas governor who arrived in Israel in early 2025, he has consistently described settlement expansion in the West Bank as lawful and consistent with scripture. During his tenure, the Trump administration green-lit accelerated construction of settlements that the United Nations and most international governments consider illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon offered the response that crystallized the government’s position. “Jews have never been and will never be settlers in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical names that Israeli nationalists prefer for the occupied West Bank. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing domestic pressure from far-right coalition partners who depend on settler constituencies, did not formally address Huckabee’s statement. His office issued only a line about opposing “vigilantism.”
The Qusra siege fits within a broader trend that human rights organizations have described as a campaign to displace Palestinians from rural areas of the West Bank. A series of settler attacks near Nablus in July left communities without water and drew from United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese a description of “pogroms against defenseless civilians all over the West Bank.”
The choice of a dual American citizen as a target was not lost on Washington. Embassy staff visited Qusra and documented conditions before and after the military response. Ridi had filed complaints with Israeli police months earlier, citing repeated harassment, disrupted utilities, and threats from settlers who had established outposts near his land.
Whether Huckabee’s statement represents a shift in American policy or a reaction driven by the victim’s nationality remains the harder question. Israeli settler groups have historically operated with high impunity in the West Bank. Investigations opened following previous raids that swept up Palestinian children as young as 16 rarely ended in prosecutions of settlers. The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli army pledged to pursue disciplinary action, though no settlers faced immediate legal jeopardy.
Palestinian officials welcomed Huckabee’s statement but called on Washington to follow words with action, specifically sanctions against the settler groups responsible for the Qusra siege and the dozens of similar operations carried out across the West Bank this year.
Whether that accountability arrives for the settlers who surrounded Qusai Ridi’s home, or for those who burned the mosque weeks before, remained unclear Thursday morning. The soldiers had left. The tents were gone. The settlers had not.
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