Over the past two years, Loui Abu Ridi and his family have worked hard in their garden, which overlooks the village of Qusra, planting cherry, fig and olive trees, installing solar lights and a path to walk through the saplings. But in recent months, harassment by local settlers has intensified: they smashed windows, ripped out cabling and attacked his brother with rocks. They brought their sheep into Ridi’s yard – the sheep ate the saplings.
Then, at the start of August, a group of settlers erected a tent outside his house and encircled two others, trapping the residents and blocking access to food and medical supplies. “When my brother called the police, they sent the military,” Abu Ridi explains, “but instead of helping him, they took selfies with the settlers”.
“Now, we live hour by hour,” he tells me. The jeopardy is constant: just before we speak, a group of armed militants was circling his property in an ATV. His 83-year-old mother has run out of medicine, but any supplies must be negotiated via the village mayor and take days to arrive. His neighbour’s children should have gone back to school this week after the summer break.
“Those kids, they cannot live their childhood. They cannot even go out in their yard to play.”
I don’t speak Arabic, but Ridi speaks fluent English – he’s Palestinian-American, and grew up in Qusra, but left to study in the States, and he now runs a chain of gas stations in Ohio. With the assistance of the US embassy, he returned to the West Bank from midwest America soon after the siege commenced in August to be with his mother, brother and sister. “I was escorted into my house and since then, I have not left.”
What is the West Bank, and who lives there?
It’s nearly 20 years since I last visited the West Bank, and I can still remember the scream of a Palestinian mother as a bulldozer splintered the walls of her two-storey house, smashing bright, woven rugs and framed family photographs into dust and debris.
The destruction of Palestinian homes and the expulsion of communities has been continuing for decades on this area of land on the west bank of the river Jordan. Since the Six Day War in 1967, the area, including Gaza, has been under Israeli occupation. The first Israeli settlements were established on the West Bank soon afterwards, backed by politicians across party lines, and have been formally recognised as violating international law ever since, although Israel has long disputed this interpretation. In 2024, the International Court of Justice declared that Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinians land unlawful.
The 1995 Oslo peace deal created three administrative areas in the West Bank intended to constitute a future Palestinian state, a prospect consistently undermined by successive Israeli governments and their supporters in the settler movement. That encompasses both hardline right factions who claim historical and religious rights to the West Bank as the ancestral land of the Jewish people and other groups, and politicians on the left, who claim Israel needs to occupy Palestinian land as a security measure.
While population counts vary, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, estimates there are around 700,000 Israelis living illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and more than 3.5 million Palestinians who call it home.
How has the violence escalated?
Since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October, when 1,200 predominantly Jewish people were killed and 251 taken hostage, settler expansion and accompanying violence on the West Bank has sharply escalated. According to UN figures, between 7 October 2023 and 21 June 2026, 1,105 Palestinians – at least 242 of them children – were killed in the West Bank.
What is happening is ethnic cleansing. B’Tselem keeps a detailed chronology of violence, demolitions and displacement, estimating just under 5,000 people have been expelled since 2023, and over 60 communities have been wiped off the map.
They are clear that this is the continuation of a systemic campaign rather than sporadic acts of violence by a handful of rogue extremists. The Israeli state has given settlers guns and uniforms, as part of locally established reserve units, and other equipment they use to terrorise Palestinians, including all-terrain vehicles. The aim is to push Palestinians into disconnected enclaves while establishing infrastructure for settlers to use, B-Tselem said, and supported by much of the Israeli government, including the far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself.
Indeed, Orit Strook, Israel’s settlement minister, drew heavy criticism from opposition politicians and families of 7 October victims, when she described the period of rapid expansion of Israeli settler control in the West Bank after the attacks as “a time of miracles”. In the past month alone, B’Tselem identified further escalation, with hundreds of settlers targeting larger Palestinians villages, attacking families, setting fire to houses and cars, and taking over farmland.
Examples of Israeli aggression towards foreign visitors have gained more international attention: British activist Finn Joughin was abducted by armed settlers, then deported from Israel, and NBC News correspondent Matt Bradley required medical treatment after his crew was attacked by masked settlers.
But, as Abu Ridi describes, settlers are largely acting with impunity. B’Tselem believe they are using the window before Israeli government elections in the autumn to “change the reality” on the West Bank.
The Israeli government is moving ahead with the E1 project, a plan to build thousands of homes on occupied land between East Jerusalem and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement on the West Bank, which many international critics argue would cut the West Bank in two and make the creation of a future Palestinian state even harder, if not impossible.
Will the sanctions make a difference?
On Tuesday, foreign secretary Ed Miliband told MPs: “This government will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two-state solution. We will act, and I will set out a comprehensive set of measures in the coming weeks.” And, the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has previously made it known he wishes to take a more “robust” position on Israel than his predecessor Keir Starmer.
However, this has not been welcomed by all quarters of his party, with Labour Friends of Israel warning that a ban on trade with settlements could become a de facto boycott of Israel due to the difficulty of separating out settlement goods from those made within the internationally recognised borders of the country. That in turn would cause significant harm to the UK’s Jewish community, the group say.
But, a recent Amnesty briefing argues that the government can use the same enforcement framework already in place for trade sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which distinguishes between goods originating in occupied Ukrainian territory and those originating in Russia.
And within Israel, security chiefs have demanded the government take action to “eradicate Jewish terrorism” on the West Bank.
With Israel more isolated internationally than ever, Abu Ridi has tried to use his dual citizenship to draw attention to what is happening across the West Bank. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee – usually no ally to the Palestinian cause – recently described the actions of the settlers besieging Abu Ridi’s home as those of “terrorists”.
“I am a Palestinian-American. But I’m not the only one living this life. There are hundreds and thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, being threatened and beaten by Israeli extremists, and forced out of their houses.”
At the end of our call, we speak a little more about his garden. Since the beginning of the siege three weeks ago, the settlers have stopped encouraging their sheep on to his property. “I was just talking with my brother about this,” he says. “We’ve started seeing green leaves, so there’s hope for those trees, if the settlers stay away from my yard.”
Loui Abu Ridi, a Palestinian-American, made the difficult decision to return to the West Bank from Ohio after the siege of his village, Qusra, in August 2026. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
