Israel says it removed settlers who took over a Qusra home

Dozens of Israeli settlers went into a Palestinian house at Ras al-Ain, on the edge of Qusra south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, on Saturday and sealed themselves inside it. Israeli soldiers and border police said afterwards that they had cleared the settlers out of the building and impounded the vehicles they arrived in.

In a joint statement the two forces described what happened as clashes involving Israeli rioters. Dozens of settlers had gone into a Palestinian home and shut themselves in, it said, and several Palestinians were hurt in the course of the break-in, among them a woman. The settlers had also thrown stones at Palestinians, according to the statement, which said units would stay in the area to keep further confrontations from starting.

The head of the village council, Abdul Azim al-Wadi, gave a different account of what the soldiers did once they were there. He said they had tried to detain Palestinians who were still trapped in the surrounded house, and were holding back wounded people from being carried out of it. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said settlers attacked an ambulance that was trying to reach the building.

Residents came out to confront the settlers when the house was first ringed, and the two sides fought in the open ground outside. Israeli army reinforcements then arrived, settlers spread across the area around the house, and land belonging to villagers was set alight. Several young men were still shut in the building, with local accounts putting at least four people inside.

Three homes at Ras al-Ain have now been encircled for a twenty-first consecutive day, and the army has declared the ground around them a closed military zone — the order it uses to clear people off a piece of land and stop them coming back to it.

Settlers attacked Palestinians elsewhere in the same hills on Saturday. Two sisters were beaten while picking figs on their own land at Silwad, northeast of Ramallah, and left with bruises and other injuries; local sources named them as Mona Mahmoud Hamed, 75, and her sister Alia, 65, and said the settlers took their mobile phones and their car keys. At Jalud, south of Nablus, settlers set on Mahmoud al-Tubasi and his wife near the house the family was forced out of months ago, and on the foreign press crew who were with them, smashing the crew's vehicle and assaulting its members. The account came from Bashar al-Qaryouti, who monitors settlement activity in the southern Nablus area.

What is unusual in Qusra on Saturday is not the raid but the paperwork. An Israeli military statement now records that dozens of Israeli civilians occupied a Palestinian family's home and that Palestinians were injured inside it — the sort of account that normally reaches the public only from the village. What the statement leaves out is any arrest: the settlers were escorted out and their cars taken, and no one was said to have been detained. The council's version has the same forces turning on the Palestinians who had been shut in the house, which is where the two accounts stop overlapping.