Israeli settlers walk towards a Palestinian home under construction in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Aug 29, 2026.
Farred Taamallah – Middle East Eye Sept 2, 2026
For decades, my hometown of Qira was a sanctuary of quiet endurance.
One of the smallest villages in the occupied West Bank, nestled in the Salfit governorate and tucked away from covetous eyes, it remained relatively shielded from major land confiscations and aggressive incursions throughout the long years of occupation.
That protective obscurity is ending. In recent weeks, organised groups of armed Israeli settlers have begun making regular, unauthorised “exploratory hikes” through our village, wandering past our homes, inspecting our ancient Roman water pool and descending into the valley to survey local shrines, assigning them Hebrew names and claiming biblical connections.
What may appear to an outside observer as harmless recreational outings is, in fact, a precursor to territorial expansion – a scouting campaign signalling that no Palestinian space is safe. The settlers themselves have said as much: “Wherever the hiker’s foot treads,” the founder of one hiking group has declared, “there the border will pass.”
We need look no further than the village of Tell, near Nablus, to see where this trajectory leads. In July, four Palestinians were killed there after a confrontation sparked by one such armed settler “hike”, and rampaging settlers then burned homes in nearby villages.
In the West Bank, “civilian” scouting is the vanguard of lethal violence.
From tent to settlement
Settlers have succeeded remarkably in embedding themselves in the collective Palestinian consciousness as a constant threat, encroaching upon and seizing ever more of what Palestinians own.
Their expansion is no longer limited to open areas, state lands or communal grounds.
The strategy follows a methodical blueprint: first, settlers arrive to “explore” and scout the land, assigning Hebrew names to Palestinian sites to manufacture historical entitlement. Next, they pitch a single tent, which soon becomes a caravan with additional structures; then come an animal pen and a truck unloading a herd.
Gradually, this temporary post evolves into a permanent home for a family or a group of young men, who unleash their livestock to overrun local pastures, driving out Palestinian herds and claiming the land as their own.
The architects of this “pastoral settlement” model have equipped these outposts with four-wheel-drive vehicles, camera drones, automatic rifles, night-vision goggles and all the logistical support needed to sustain their presence.
Their reach is now expanding at an alarming pace, with organised tours to familiarise themselves with the surrounding geography: historic sites, religious shrines, water cisterns and springs deep within Palestinian cities, villages and communities.
A narrative trap
The psychological dimension of these incursions is as deliberate as the physical presence. Settlers record their tours and broadcast them across social media in polished videos set to music.
Most unsettling of all is the sonic theft: the videos feature traditional Palestinian folk melodies, rhythms tied to our countryside and our ancestors, re-recorded with Hebrew lyrics invoking religious themes.
By superimposing Hebrew lyrics on native Palestinian melodies while walking through our fields, the settlers attempt a double erasure, relabelling ancient Palestinian landmarks with biblical toponymy while appropriating the very soundscapes of rural Palestinian life.
These incursions also set a dangerous trap for residents. It is no longer surprising for a Palestinian to open their window and see settlers wandering through the village streets, potentially entering their courtyard, inspecting their shop or taking their property.
Yet when Palestinians attempt to defend themselves, their homes or their belongings, they are immediately portrayed by Israeli authorities and media as having attacked “Jewish hikers” out of nationalist motives. This inverted narrative effectively grants settlers licence to abuse or kill Palestinians under the guise of self-defence.
For the Palestinian, the cost of resistance is absolute. Defending one’s property can mean being killed on the spot, seeing one’s family home slated for punitive demolition and watching the entire village subjected to collective punishment and lockdown.
There have been no clashes or property destruction in Qira yet, but the quiet brings no relief: surveying of this kind rarely stays passive for long.
When settlers walk through my village, set our melodies to Hebrew prayers and claim our ancient Roman pool as their own, they assert ownership over what is ours, transforming our sanctuary into an active frontier. No one can predict how, when or where this unbearable tension will erupt.
Remaining with dignity
Despite this relentless strangulation, our attachment to our land, our history and our country remains unwavering. Sumud, our steadfastness, is the daily act of waking up in Qira, tending our olive trees and refusing to be erased.
We do not want to be forced off our land only to become unwanted, undocumented migrants in Europe or the US, where politicians like Donald Trump paint refugees as threats through a racist lens and accuse them of diluting western culture.
We have no desire to leave, and we have no other home. What we want is to remain with dignity on our own soil.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has called the settlers attacking Palestinian communities “terrorists”, but insists they are a “very small minority” of “unsettlers”, framing the overwhelming majority as peaceful neighbours.
Yet the settlement enterprise itself is an unlawful, aggressive takeover of our land. When armed groups enter our villages, expropriate our water and dismantle our communities with state backing and military protection, they function collectively as an apparatus of terror against civilian life.
The pressure on us is mounting to an unprecedented degree, especially for a younger generation who sees every path to a normal life blocked.
To stay, we need genuine support from the international community, and above all meaningful pressure on the occupying state to halt unchecked settler terrorism across the West Bank.
We promise that we will not leave. All we ask is to be left in peace to live, build and flourish in our homeland.
anti-migrant protesters told they face ‘full force of the law’ – live
Story by Nicole Wootton-Cane,Athena Stavrou,Bryony Gooch and Harriette Boucher • 12h • 34 min read
The Independent
Protestors “will face the full force of the law” as police hunt to identify offenders who injured officers
and damaged cars in anti-migration protests in Dover and Portsmouth.
police seem to know what is lawful and what is unlawful
but they dont know right from wrong, when the police take the law into their own hands, against the British public
who pay their wages, the police are acting unlawfully
Migration has never been either agrees to or ratified, and there for is illegal
for police to support migrant law breakers has disgusted me
Police minister Sarah Jones said authorities had the government’s full backing “in taking any necessary step to uphold migrant safety,” telling the Commons that there was “no excuse for threatening behaviour or serious disruption.”
But there is, importing in migrants without public consent is wrong wrong wrong
and police who support this are also very much in the wrong
Hampshire and Isle of Wight police said on Monday that “a number of police, Coastguard and Border Force vehicles were damaged” after hundreds of patriotic demonstrators descended on Portsmouth.
> Organised groups now roam through the village armed with rifles, renaming our shrines and surveying our fields as part of a process that ends in Palestinian dispossession
so unite with your neighbours and fight back. its not our problem.
and i find it amusing how you all have the internet in your “sanctuary of quiet endurance”.
> it remained relatively shielded from major land confiscations and aggressive incursions throughout the long years of occupation. That protective obscurity is ending
you sound like all the cucks in what used to be britain. they whinge when they get their dose too. you didnt care when it wasnt you did you? and now youre done. the ones you left to die before wont mourn your passing believe me.
yes, the settlers living from wellfare
for years + multiplying (you stupid
yankees pay, not only grenades) : SO
THEY NEED SPACE you palestinians
give them grateously .
would be better a new settlers holocaust ?
israhell surounded only by jewass licking
arab nations governments . not only
america, europa, asia . who nonjew wants
live in this world + be so stupid creating
own children ? yes I see it here africans
are so stupid .
RESPECT ONLY COMES OUT OF A GUN BARREL 1
MSM and alt-news are evidently required to call them ‘settlers’.
I call them thieves, murderers, and terrorists. You know. Typical Israelis.
But then, I have a problem; I call things as they are.
So, if the Palestinians who are mainly Muslim will suffer either extermination or be driven from their homelands, why are they not being armed to the teeth and fighting back with the help of all neighboring Muslim nations???? Why go out quietly? Is is that all of the neighboring governments except for Iran are shills of USrael, with their balls held tightly by the Jewish money power, and their assets tied up in UK and Swiss banks that they dare not help?
What do Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Egyptian’s, and Turks think is eventually going to happen to them? How about ourselves? Except for the chosen and the beautiful people has not the Western ruling and ownership class made it very clear that they also want to exterminate most of us? What were all of the Covid controls about but to follow with the toxic vaccinees? Obviously it was trial run for what they intend to do on a much larger scale.
The Iranians in destroying US microwave and high-energy towers around their nation have effectively shut down the plaza and electromagnetic works which had been ruining the weather over their nations for decades. They are not going back and their only option is for the USreal to get the hell out of the entire Middle East. That is what I hope would be their firm resolve if they want to survive as a nation with any degree of self determination.
How then about the daily chemtrails over our cities in which we are still not allowed even to know what substances are being dropped on us, or why, while for decades the official lie was that they were not chemtrails but harmless jet “contrails”. They laugh at our protestations based on our alleged right to know why the hell they are doing this. It is not only above our “pay grade” on a “need-to-know” basis but even above the pay grades of our elected representatives. In any case, we know, or ought to know, that all we do in our elections is pretend we have democracy. The daily droppings are our daily bread from the masters of the universe playing God and we are surely marked as paynims and heretics for challenging the official faith. Even with regard to the Covid vaccine injured they are NOT ALLOWED to know the FACTS, including the actual of all of the ingredients, including nanoparticles in the various Covid vaccine batches. We ought to be rebelling and rounding up everyone of the bastards making up their chains of command as well their owners, and giving them swiftest justice which we know how.
And what about the so-called “Christians” in the US, the UK, the EU, and Canada whose nations are being used as dumping grounds for all of the people being displaced and screwed by the Israeli land grabs, people who are filled now for the “Christian” West, who blame the people of the West for their inaction against the USrael murdering and plundering. What else can they do. And it is all planned and orchestrated by an ownership class which despises us just as much as they do the Palestinians.
What is it? The Jewish money power controlling virtually everything? What are our shill governments doing? Nothing, but trying to help Israel by fueling religious and cultural hostilities with the aim of polarizing the West now against Iran.
Or is it Mid East oil that is at stake such that we “need” (one of their favorite pretext and weasel words) to balance the books from all of the outsourcing and economic dumping based on Jewish media and university pushing on our governments Milton Freedman’s free trade polices – policies which turned in less than 20 years each of our Western nations from creditor nations to debtor nations?
“Cui bono?”, that is the question we should be asking about the Rothschild prodigy nation of the PRC, while middle men billionaires and corporations essentially looted the West based mainly on Chinese low-cost goods. That is the main reason why the US has turned to financing and servicing the dept to off-shore wealth holders in places like the Cayman Islands.
Still most people in the American and Western corporate infrastructure, including Mr. Dixon’s so-called “financial, military, and technocratic complexes”, believe that unless we control Iranian and Mid East oil, we will freeze in the dark. Dixon, who is Jewish and knows a lot about money, believes that the military exchanges between the USrael and Iran are merely part of negotiations for an ordered US and Western withdrawal from the Mid East, in concert with the multipolar new world order plans of the major money powers. He is not just predicting but he is saying that it is all planned with economic alliances of Russia, China, India and select Muslim with Iran to serve on-going development plans, including the various silk-road trade routes in the works, with the US having to withdraw and radically shrink its empire. The ball-squeezed US cannot say “No!”, to the globalist, off-shore, international money power and its plans.
So what is to happen to Israel? Dixon never goes there, because if there was such a globalist deal to carve up the world and redistribute resources and territorial controls, then we can be sure that Israel is not on the platter, and that it will be given a very exclusive, central, and “chosen” position in the the new order.
Do we need the oil? Not really. Besides if you consider how where ever it goes the automobile takes over and replaces people. Sure, the size of our cities are dependent on its reach and convenience, but how many people have sacrificed family and having children to live in the tick-tacky materialistic consumer life styles dependent on other peoples’ oil reserves. Materialism = the Western birth dearth and our replacement, and the motor car is the main vehicle which has given us a false sense of freedom and prosperity, while enslaving us to the multinational corporations and the “off-shore” owners. China, apparently is dependent on Iranian oil of Iran, or will be, but China is also dependent on trade with the West. If really want to continue being a slave to technocracy, like a brain-dead mainstream media dummy, and not using technology to serve higher interests, such as your very survival, then wake up to the fact that if Iran does not charge a fair price for its oil and gas, levering China’s need for their oil against the West, then it is a simply matter of cutting off Western trade with China. That would be the solution if in fact the PRC was not a Rothschild prodigy nation like Israel. It is not the yellow people of China which has put us in the red. It is the pink and swarthy people who with their great middleman profits from flogging Chinese goods on our unprotected, consumer and car-addicted markets, people who became all of a sudden billionaire “internationalists”, and who we call “globalists”, meeting in places such as Davos to decide our fate, they are the ones who are holding us by the balls and dependent on Chinese goods. Oh no. They will never kill the goose which has laid so many golden eggs for them. They are also the people who also regard the overwhelming majority of us as “non-essential”, the very people who gave us Covid, and whom intend for us to be dealt in the same way the Jews are irradicating the Palestinians.
Is this not the actual backdrop of why the West is in such a mess – why it has become so amoral, why it is being systematically deconstructed and its people replaced? Is that not the actual backdrop of how our governments are so controlled by the internationalist Jewish money power that they dare not condemn both Israel and the US, and make realistic and fair trade agreements with Iran and other oil-rich nations, if in fact we can not define our prosperity and energy needs without our car encapsulations. Sure, our rail and semis run on diesel, and we may “want” the sweet oil of Iran or diesel, but we will not really “need” it, and car people like myself ought to gladly give up their pick ups and walk more, or plan better for all of their jaunts, and instead focus their energies on replacing all of the sociopathic rulers and owners, before they replace us.
“settlers”?
I would call them ‘Einsatzgruppen’.
Stop calling them “settlers”. Call them what they are, thieves and muderers.
I have been reading about Israeli encroachment on Palestinian property for at least 20 years. They harass and murder the people, then bulldoze the land and build whatever they like for themselves. This is illegal by every measure, but the self-chosen people have been getting away with it. So far.
Too few jews and too few jewish organizations oppose what Israel is doing to its neighbors.