Israeli settlers have continued besieging seven Palestinians, including four children, from the Yusuf Shinaran family inside their home in Wadi al-Rakhim, in Masafer Yatta, south of the West Bank, for a second week. The siege has restricted their movement and involved attacks on family members and their property, while appeals and legal action have failed to end it.
The settlers set up a tent just metres from the house and take turns staying there, according to the family and a local activist monitoring developments in the area. The family says those in the tent prevent residents from leaving their home, after harassment and pursuit had already disrupted the children’s education before the current siege began.
The family co-ordinates officially to obtain its necessities
The family was forced to reinforce the doors and windows of the house, while leaving to secure daily necessities became a risk for any of its members. The family said Yusuf Shinaran, his wife and one of their children were mistreated and beaten on the first day of the siege when they tried to leave the house.
Shinaran says his daily life has been paralysed and that calling in the Israeli army to lift the siege has not changed the situation. He added that soldiers come to the site and sit with the settlers on top of a well in front of the house, while the family must co-ordinate through official Palestinian liaison channels with the Israeli side whenever it wants to obtain water.
Shinaran said he left the house after official Palestinian bodies arranged co-ordination so he could obtain some of the family’s necessities, but continued waiting for further co-ordination to be able to return. Some supplies reached the family members days earlier through similar official co-ordination, while the settlers continued to remain in front of and around the house.
Ongoing siege and repeated attacks on the family
He stressed that these events are taking place in an Area B zone, which is administratively under the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords. Shinaran’s children have been unable to attend school for three years because of what the family describes as continuing harassment and pursuit by settlers and the army. The children spend most of their time inside the house, as the family considers staying there safer than travelling to school each day.
During the same three years, Shinaran was prevented from reaching the farmland where he grew up. He said settlers destroyed more than 60 grapevines and 40 olive trees and damaged a mint bed in front of the house, before the pressure escalated into the family being besieged inside its home.
Activist Osama Makhamreh, who monitors violations in Masafer Yatta, believes what is happening is neither an individual act nor an exceptional case, but an effort targeting a strategic location between two Palestinian towns, with the aim of separating them and opening the way for settlement expansion. Makhamreh described what the Shinaran family is facing as an “ongoing siege”, saying it is more severe than the siege imposed on three Palestinian homes in the town of Qusra, south of Nablus in the northern West Bank.
Activist links siege to demolition of nearby tent
He added that Shinaran’s home is far from journalists and their cameras, reducing documentation of what is happening around it. He explained that, in his assessment, the siege was imposed by settlers as a punitive measure after the Israeli army demolished eight times a tent they had erected 200 metres from the house in April last year.
He said the demolitions followed legal action and efforts before Israeli courts. Makhamreh added that the settlers responded to the tent’s removal by setting up a new tent metres from the family home and began pressuring its residents, including through beatings and property damage, in an attempt to force them to leave.
Legal action to protect the family led to the detention of several settlers and the removal of some of them from the area around the house, but others continued to remain in front of it and in nearby areas. The rights activist said the legal action aimed to remove the danger and guarantee the residents’ freedom of movement, but the army set up a military post at the doorstep of the house while the settlers remained and continued the acts of vandalism attributed to them.
The home’s location separates two Palestinian valleys
Makhamreh links the pressure on the family to the home’s location between Wadi al-Rakhim, south of Yatta to the north, and Wadi Jahish, which belongs to the town of al-Samu to the south. He believes control of the site would enable the takeover of a mountain range separating the two towns, after a tent was erected and an outpost established, followed by expansion westwards and eastwards across the area between them.
Makhamreh recalled attacks in Wadi al-Rakhim over the past year that resulted in the killing of Amir Shinaran and his brother suffering paraplegia, as well as the burning of homes and vehicles. He stressed that these incidents also took place inside an Area B zone.
In Khirbet al-Hummus, adjacent to Wadi al-Rakhim to the north, Makhamreh spoke of continuing attacks carried out by settlers, particularly since an outpost was established four months ago. He said the outpost had isolated Palestinian homes from one another and imposed an ongoing siege on residents, with settlers and their cows present between the houses.
According to Makhamreh, the current pressure across Masafer Yatta, particularly in the area known as Firing Zone 918, aims to push residents to leave their villages and hamlets, based on its classification as a military training area under a court ruling issued in 2022. At the same time, he said settlers were establishing six new outposts there.
He pointed to a broad Israeli army operation against Palestinian residents in the area in recent days, involving the seizure of vehicles and agricultural tractors, amid local fears that new demolitions will be carried out and more villages removed, following dozens of previous demolitions in Masafer Yatta villages.
Masafer Yatta lies between 14 and 24 kilometres south-east of Hebron, covering an area of 35,000 square kilometres, according to data on the area. During the 1980s, the Israeli army designated 30 square kilometres containing 13 residential communities, home to more than 3,000 people, as firing zones for military training.
The developments in Masafer Yatta come amid an escalation in attacks across the West Bank since the start of the war on Gaza.
The number of attacks attributed to the Israeli army has exceeded 63,000, including more than 14,740 attacks carried out by settlers, resulting in the deaths of 66 Palestinians, alongside the establishment of more than 211 settlement outposts.
