Israeli forces spent Thursday dismantling "illegal outposts" that Jewish settlers had erected days earlier in the West Bank village of Qusra, a standoff that pulled in a rare public rebuke from a senior U.S. official, according to Foreign Policy's World Brief writer Alexandra Sharp. Settlers had built encampments over the weekend surrounding three isolated houses on the edge of the Palestinian town of 5,000, cutting off water and electricity and blockading roads that trapped two Palestinian families and five visiting Italian nationals inside.
One of the besieged homes belongs to an American citizen, drawing Washington directly into the dispute. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee called the settlers "terrorists" and denounced their "thuggish behavior" on social media, an unusually sharp rebuke from an administration that has generally sided with Israel. The homeowner, a Palestinian American born in Qusra who now lives in Toledo, Ohio, watched the siege unfold from the United States via home security cameras while his brother and nephew remained trapped inside. Qusra sits in Area B, West Bank territory under Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control where Jewish settlements are not permitted; the Israeli military condemned the settlers' actions and declared the area a restricted military zone, an order the settlers defied the next day, touching off clashes with Israeli forces that initially forced the military to back down.
Overnight, the Israel Defense Forces mounted a larger operation alongside police and security services, with video showing a bulldozer, armored vehicles, and vans full of troops moving into Qusra. By Thursday morning, the IDF said it had dismantled two illegal outposts and detained one Israeli, though it remained unclear when the settlers would be fully removed. In the process, the military reportedly ordered several Palestinian residents to evacuate ahead of a multi-day operation against the settlers before backtracking and saying Palestinians would not be removed from their homes.
A senior Israeli security source told Haaretz that settler violence in Qusra and beyond has turned the West Bank into a "powder keg that could explode at any moment." Defense officials said the military is stretched thin and at times unwilling to respond to the frequent clashes between Palestinians and settlers whom the Israeli and U.S. governments have at times empowered. "By revoking the Biden administration's sanctions on violent settler groups and failing to restrain its ally, the Trump administration bears much of the blame for emboldening Israeli settler extremists," Foreign Policy contributor Azriel Bermant wrote this week, a framing that puts Huckabee's condemnation in tension with his own government's broader posture toward the settler movement.