“The horrors unfolding in Qusra are far from an isolated incident,” a leader at Amnesty International declared Friday as the Israel Defense Forces and police failed to remove Israeli settlers who have besieged Palestinian homes in the illegally occupied West Bank since Sunday.

Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said that the events in the village over the past week “reflect the relentless escalation and expansion of an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed, and funded by the state of Israel, with the aim of displacing Palestinians across the occupied West Bank.”

“The three families under siege have been threatened, harassed, and attacked by Israeli settlers from nearby outposts for several months,” she stressed. With settlers having cut off the water and electricity, residents are “running out of food, and lack access to basic necessities,” she added, and local activists have been unable to deliver supplies.

The Amnesty statement followed similar condemnation from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which said Thursday that “these criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the occupying power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families, and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave their homes and land. Time is running out for these three families before they are forcibly displaced.”

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said Thursday that it “condemns in the strongest terms the dangerous escalation in settler terrorism,” highlighting that the attack has involved “sabotage of electricity and water networks, shooting at houses, and attempts to burn children, in systematic assaults that can only be described as terroristic, aimed at the displacement and extermination of the Palestinian people.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Friday that “IDF and Border Police forces have attempted several times this week to evacuate the settlers, but they have remained at the site. The group initially put up a shade canopy there, despite the presence of soldiers. Border Police forces arrived at the site and dismantled the canopy, yet the settlers remained at a nearby location, waiting for the forces to leave.”

Ziv Stahl, executive director of the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, told The Associated Press that “it’s like a kids’ game, like cat and mouse… It’s clearly not a matter of capability but a matter of will.”

Qusra resident Abdul Kareem Hassan similarly told Al Jazeera that “this is all a charade,” and if the IDF “were serious, the whole operation would not take them one hour. We’re talking about 20 settlers. If they would treat them the same way they treat Palestinians, they could finish in less than an hour.”

IDF troops have long been accused of and documented not interfering with or even aiding in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

One of the besieged homes is owned by Palestinian-American Loui Ridi, who is based in Ohio. His brother and nephew are among those trapped.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on social media Thursday that his embassy “has been VERY involved and the IDF and Israel police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this. The actions of those doing this to this family’s home is criminal… Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting. No excuse for such thuggish behavior.”

Huckabee later shared a video from the scene, then claimed on Friday that Israeli “‘settlers’ are not the problem,” and the violent ones are a “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families and to Israel.” The ambassador also pointed to The Jerusalem Post’s reporting on one settlement leader, Ysrael Ganz, condemning the outpost in Qusra.

Reuters reported that Ridi welcomed Huckabee’s initial remarks but also said they were not enough. He told the news agency that “we need protection. We need supplies. We need to live freely in our house.”

As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the UN Security Council the previous day that demolitions of civilian infrastructure, mass displacement of Palestinians, and illegal settlement expansion have brought the West Bank to a “breaking point.”

While settler attacks were once concentrated in the Israeli-controlled Area C, Alakbarov said, settlers are increasingly behaving violently toward Palestinians in Areas A and B. Guevara Rosas noted that “the homes targeted in these attacks are located in Area B of the West Bank, supposedly under Palestinian administrative control and Israeli military control, according to the classification of the Oslo Accords.”

“Yet Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances trying to deliver food and water to the homes were also attacked by settlers. Despite these violent attacks, Israeli forces allowed the settlers to remain [in] close proximity to the Palestinian families’ homes,” she said. Sources told Amnesty that for several hours on Thursday, the IDF forced two besieged families and six neighboring households to evacuate their homes.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim similarly reported that “Israeli soldiers initially tried to move the trapped families out of their homes while settlers remained camped outside. The families refused, not trusting that the Israeli soldiers would allow them back into their homes, and were eventually grouped together in one home.”

Guevara Rosas argued that “for far too long, the world has ignored the immense, unfathomable suffering of Palestinians being uprooted and erased from land they have inhabited for generations. The international community must stop treating such incidents as ‘isolated’ and instead hold Israel accountable.”

“Israel, as the occupying power, has a legal obligation to protect the Palestinian population under its control and not to stand by or worse, stand with settlers—while they lay siege to Palestinian homes and cut off families’ access to healthcare, electricity, and water for days on end” she continued.

“States must end any form of direct and indirect support for Israel’s unlawful occupation of the occupied Palestinian territory and its brutal system of apartheid, including its illegal settlement enterprise,” said the Amnesty leader, whose group has also joined advocates and experts around the world in denouncing Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

“This includes banning trade and investment that contribute to the maintenance of Israeli settlements, as well as ending any cooperation and assistance to entities and individuals involved in the settlement enterprise,” Guevara Rosas said. “States should also show no further hesitation in imposing targeted sanctions on senior Israeli officials allegedly responsible for international crimes, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid, and forcible transfer of Palestinians in the unlawfully occupied West Bank.”

She added that “it is imperative that states demonstrate unequivocal resolve by increasing protective measures for Palestinian communities at risk of displacement and using all their diplomatic and political leverage to secure the return of forcibly displaced Palestinians to their homes. Failure to act would further embolden Israel and state-backed Israeli settlers to continue their unlawful and violent actions against Palestinians, who are left unprotected and without any recourse to justice.”

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