Area B Is a Lie: The Siege of Qusra and the West’s License for Genocide

Loai Ridi is still inside the house. Weeks after settlers surrounded three homes on the edge of Qusra, after he came from Toledo, Ohio to stand on his own roof, after Mike Huckabee called the attackers “Israeli terrorists,” the siege has not ended. It has only changed form. Occupation forces have installed new gates and cement blocks. Settlers still walk freely. Soldiers remain parked outside. The entire area remains a closed military zone. Movement in and out is not free. Some humanitarian corridors have been permitted for the delivery of food. That is not the lifting of a siege. It is the administration of one.

The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem has now promised that the siege would be lifted within three days. As of this writing, nothing has changed.

This is happening in Area B of the occupied West Bank — the zone that was supposed to prove the occupation could be managed, even civilized.

The Oslo II Accord of 1995 carved the West Bank into three administrative categories that were meant to be temporary. Area A — about 18 percent of the territory, mainly Palestinian cities — was placed under Palestinian civil and security control. Area B — about 22 percent, including many villages and their built-up areas — was given to the Palestinian Authority for civil affairs, with security formally “joint” but in practice dominated by Israel. Area C — more than 60 percent, including most farmland, water, and open space — remained under full Israeli civil and military control. The map was never a map of two states. It was a map of fragments. Area C slices Areas A and B into hundreds of disconnected islands. Israel was supposed to transfer Area C gradually to Palestinian jurisdiction. It never did. Instead it filled Area C with colonies, outposts, firing zones, and roads Palestinians cannot use.

Qusra’s built-up area sits largely in Area B. Much of its agricultural land falls in Area C. Under the letter of Oslo, Palestinian civilian life in Area B is supposed to be administered by the Palestinian Authority. Under the reality of occupation, Israeli soldiers declare closed military zones, install gates, occupy houses “for protection,” and stand with violent colonizers while families cannot leave their own yards. The law that is supposed to apply — Palestinian civil authority, limited joint security — is suspended whenever the occupation requires it. The law that actually applies is the law of the stronger party. Area B is a lie told to the world so that a house can be surrounded in daylight and still be described as a matter of “security coordination.”

That lie is the architecture of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. It is not always a single expulsion order. It is a grinding combination of siege, sabotage of water and electricity, closed military zones, outposts that become permanent, and an army that protects the colonizer. Surround a house. Cut it off. Permit a corridor when the cameras arrive. Wait. Take the land when the family breaks. The same method used in Jalud last month is used in Qusra this month. Rights groups have documented it across the territory. The United Nations has recorded thousands of Palestinians displaced by colonial violence and access restrictions this year alone.

While Loai Ridi cannot walk his own land freely, Israel is locking in a larger cut. This month authorities opened tenders for more than 1,200 housing units in the E1 corridor between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim — part of a plan for over 3,400 units. E1 would drive a wedge through the West Bank, isolate East Jerusalem, and make a contiguous Palestinian state geographically impossible. Bezalel Smotrich has said the point is to bury that possibility. European governments, Canada and others issued statements calling the tenders unacceptable and illegal under international law. They urged Israel to retract them. They warned companies of legal risk. They did not impose consequences that would stop the bids. The communiqué is the substitute for action.

On August 25, the same system announced itself in occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli forces stormed the last operating UNRWA facility there — the Qalandiya Training Centre in Kafr Aqab, a vocational school that has trained Palestinian refugees for decades. Staff were expelled. An Israeli flag was raised in the courtyard. Itamar Ben-Gvir sat in the director’s chair, filmed himself, and announced that UNRWA was finished under his watch. He called the agency and its workers terrorists. Netanyahu said the operation followed his directive and the anti-UNRWA legislation Israel has passed. UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the raid. UN premises are inviolable under international law. Israel treated that rule as optional. Ben-Gvir treated the raid as a trophy.

The conventions and resolutions being violated are not obscure. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory and from destroying civilian property except where rendered absolutely necessary by military operations. It requires the occupier to ensure food and medical supplies and forbids collective punishment. Additional Protocol I and customary humanitarian law protect civilians and civilian objects. The Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid pillage and require respect for private property. UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and Resolution 338 (1973) rest on withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967. Resolution 2334 (2016) states that settlements have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law. The International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion found the occupation itself unlawful and held that third states must not recognize it or assist in maintaining it. The Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations protects UN premises from interference. The Genocide Convention obliges states to prevent and punish genocide. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court gives the Court jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Israel and its patrons treat this body of law as a menu.

The United States continues to attack the system that produced those rules. It has sanctioned International Criminal Court officials, pressured the Court over warrants related to Gaza, and used its Security Council veto to block enforcement. In Qusra the same government that undermines the Court now tells a trapped American citizen that the siege will end in three days. The promise costs nothing. The military zone remains.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU High Representative Kaja Kallas issue statements about international law and the two-state solution while the Union remains Israel’s largest trading partner and while member states keep the association agreement intact. Germany and Italy have repeatedly blocked or diluted meaningful EU sanctions — on settlement trade, on the association agreement, on figures such as Ben-Gvir. Words accumulate. Weapons and components continue to move. Impunity is the policy.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen can sign a joint letter condemning E1 and, in the same political season, describe an “enemy within” Europe as foreigners, Hamas supporters, and “people with an Islamic background” who reject European values. The pairing is not a contradiction. It is the structure: ritual concern for Palestinian land in a communiqué, and a domestic politics that treats Palestinian and Muslim presence as a civilizational threat. Islamophobia is not a side issue. It is how Western governments make the occupation and the genocide thinkable at home.

In Gaza the same logic has reached a new register of cruelty. After kites flown by children drifted toward the border — kites the Israeli military itself found carried no explosives — Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened targeted strikes against “those responsible” and the evacuation of areas from which kites or balloons are launched. Katz said a kite would be treated like a military target, with or without explosives. Parents were told to stop their children from flying paper and string. The UN human rights office called the threat of expulsion over children’s kite-flying outrageous. A childhood act of play in a landscape of tents and rubble is redefined as a military target. That is what intensification looks like when a population has already been starved, displaced, and bombed: even play is militarized.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, has called an international protection presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza “absolutely urgent.” Third states, she reminds them, have an obligation under the ICJ opinion to act to end the unlawful occupation. She has asked whether the Secretary-General’s good offices and the General Assembly’s Uniting for Peace mechanism can break Security Council paralysis. Human rights organizations have made the same demand: emergency international intervention to stop the violence, halt the sieges, and end the open defiance of international law. No such force has been deployed. The Council remains blocked. The occupation proceeds.

Palestinians have a right to resist occupation. That right is not a slogan. It is recognized in the framework of self-determination and in the law governing peoples under colonial and alien domination. Resistance does not legalize the targeting of civilians. Occupation and genocide do not become lawful because the occupied refuse to disappear. What the West calls “security” in this context is the security of a colonial project: illegal housing units, sieges, the seizure of UN schools, the branding of kite-flying children as launchers, the branding of UN workers as terrorists.

Israel is not an exception to Western imperialism. It is one of its most concentrated expressions — a nuclear-armed colonial state enjoying near-total impunity, armed and diplomatically covered by the same governments that write the communiqués. Qusra is a village on some beautiful hills in Area B. It is also a demonstration of how the system works when no one with power is willing to stop it.

Loai Ridi asked that Americans know a U.S. citizen is under siege. They know. The embassy is monitoring. It has promised three days. Humanitarian corridors are not freedom of movement. A closed military zone is not a resolved crisis. The gates are still in place. The colonizers still walk freely. The law that is supposed to apply does not apply. That is the current reality on the ground.

Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at [email protected]