The West Bank village of Qusra was smoldering as I arrived. Clouds of black smoke swirled from a field where rampaging Israeli settlers had lit it on fire, while also setting fire to Palestinian homes and vehicles, according to Qusra residents.
“At any moment, we expect settlers to attack,” said Abdel-Majeed Hassan, a salt-of-the-earth farmer in his 70s. He showed me the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said settlers had destroyed.
Six residents of this village have been killed in such attacks since October, when the Israeli government responded to the Hamas terror attack from Gaza by imposing far harsher rule in the West Bank — more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements — and by giving armed settlers freer rein to attack Palestinian farmers. The result is a despair and fury that every Palestinian I spoke to predicted would lead to a bloody uprising.
I met Hassan here in 2015, on one of my many trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories over the years. Despite enduring repeated attacks by settlers who coveted his land, he thought then that he could hang on to his family farm.
Now he’s not so sure. His wife argues for abandoning their house for fear that settlers will firebomb it. After settlers smashed all their windows, the family installed heavy steel screens and window shutters, but this month settlers still tried to force their way inside while his granddaughter was visiting. So now he tells his grandchildren not to visit, and he or his son stands watch all night, every night.
A few days before my visit, Hassan said, settlers set fire to his barn with his sheep inside. Hassan ran and extinguished the fire as settlers hurled stones; “rocks were falling on my head like rain,” he said. Others in the village confirmed his account.
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