For more than two weeks now, the Palestinian town of Qusra has been under an Israeli-imposed siege as the displacement of Palestinian families there persists. What began with Israeli settlers armed with military-issued weapons transformed into a joint military-settler operation.

At the beginning of the attack and siege, Israeli settlers had cut off water and electricity from the Palestinian residents in the town, with the purpose of driving them out and taking over their homes and lands. After some media attention and international recognition of the depravity happening in Qusra, the Israeli army moved in in lieu of the settlers, declaring the area a closed military zone and imposing their own restrictions. But in reality, this distinction between the army and settlers obscures what is happening in Qusra and in the West Bank generally.

They may wear different clothes, but in the end what is happening is that armed Israelis are imposing the same political reality, one where Palestinians cannot exist or live freely in their own homes.

What Qusra does offer us is not another story of settler impunity, but a clear showcasing of how dispossession can happen through the division of labour.

The siege: different forms of enclosures

When we speak of a siege, there may be a tendency to imagine something with a perimeter. A barricade, soldiers surrounding the city, tanks stationed at entrances and exits, and darkness as a population is completely cut off from the outside world. Yet what we see in the West Bank is a much more dispersed form of enclosures.

Over the last couple of years, the West Bank has witnessed record-high restrictions on movement affecting all 3.4 million Palestinians. As of December 2025, there is a 43% annual increase in movement obstacles affecting Palestinians. The Israeli security apparatus, in coordination with Israeli settlers, has erected gates at the entrances and exits of every Palestinian town and village, designated dozens of roads as forbidden to Palestinians, hoisted hundreds of military-controlled checkpoints, declared dozens of acres as closed military zones, approved dozens of new outposts, and reclassified Palestinian lands as Israel.

What this has done is make movement conditional. The enclosures do not have to be continuous to be effective. What they have meant for daily calculations is that Palestinians may leave their homes, but not go through that road (and instead endure an hours-long detour with the possibility of being stopped and beaten at a checkpoint), that they may reach their farmlands, but not this week.

It means they may go to work and school, but at risk of being attacked by armed Israelis who have decided to gather at a major roundabout. In the case of Qusra, it means you may remain in your home, but someone could come and make remaining there progressively impossible.

Looking at these dynamics, it becomes clearer that the West Bank is a large open-air prison. One which may not operate as a conventional prison but as a prison whose walls can move, randomly and repeatedly.

This is perhaps the most striking aspect of highlighting Qusra without context. It inadvertently suggests that this besiegement of families across three homes is an aberration in an otherwise functioning territory.

The shrinking distance between home and frontier

The case of Qusra should emphasise and magnify to the world exactly what Palestinians encounter across the West Bank, and that is a relentlessly shrinking distinction between home and frontier. This has been Israel’s strategy of anticipation where it engineers the expectation of expulsion, and is even using Qusra as an instrument to punctuate this reality.

What is being said, through this organised state violence, is that any Palestinian home or land can become a target. If it is not taken over by Israeli settlers, it is declared a military zone and taken by the army, and at best it becomes a case of “contested land,” which can protract for weeks, months, or even years.

What we see is not a simple act of controlling territory, but a new geography of occupation where it becomes about altering the conditions of reality under which Palestinians can inhabit these lands. So, rather than expel an entire village and obliterate entire cities as was the case in Gaza, Israel is teaching Palestinians what staying will cost.

Right now, what Israel is doing in Qusra and elsewhere in the West Bank does not stop at displacement. It is forcing Palestinians to consider: “Is this house still worth living in?” “Can my children safely grow up here?” “If I leave for work this morning, will I be able to return in the evening?”

Qusra exposes an architecture of colonialism in which the West Bank is experienced as one large enclosure without the need for a wall. While Gaza has made the word “siege” synonymous with a territory encircled from the outside, Qusra and the West Bank require that we recognise another form of siege. One which advances from the inside of the territory where the perimeter is constantly redrawn around Palestinian lives.

We must understand that Qusra is not an isolated incident of settlers and military between settlers and three families. It is three families against one of the strongest and most brutal regimes of our time, and it doesn’t end with them. It extends to all Palestinians in the West Bank facing a large-scale transformation which not only seizes lands and homes, but holds captive Palestinian lives.

The world needs to move not just for Qusra, but for Palestinians and what remains of Palestinian lives and will to persist. The walls of this prison do not stand still; they move around us, compressing spaces in which life can be ordinary, where even our own homes become Israel’s battlefields.

Displacement and dispossession are not sudden events of violent expulsion; they are the acts of siege that happen in Palestinian daily life.

Mariam Barghouti is a writer and journalist based in the West Bank. She has been covering the region as a reporter and analyst for ten years, served as the senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, and is a member of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network. 

Follow Mariam on X: @MariamBarghouti

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.