Youssef Hassan says he cannot leave his own house. According to his account, reported Monday in the Times of Israel liveblog, settlers in Qusra, a Palestinian town south of Nablus in the West Bank, built a structure blocking the entrance to his home and cut its electricity, and for more than a day he, his wife and their two daughters, ages 2 and 4, have been trapped inside [1].
Soldiers reportedly did come. In the family's account, they arrived at the scene, prayed with the settlers, and then left without clearing them from the doorstep [1]. The Israeli activist group Looking the Occupation in the Eye, which relayed the family's situation, described them as "trapped in their home, with a violent and armed settler militia threatening them" [1].
That is the family's account, attributed here as their account: the blocked entrance, the cut power, the soldiers who prayed and left. What sits behind it is not an account. It is the Israeli security establishment's own ledger. Israel's security establishment recorded a 63 percent rise in settler "nationalistic crime" in the West Bank in the first half of 2026: 660 attacks, up from 405 in the same period of 2025 [1].
The arithmetic holds. From 405 to 660 is 255 additional recorded attacks, an increase of 63 percent. Spread across the roughly 181 days of a half year, 660 attacks works out to more than three recorded attacks per day, every day, for six months, by our division of the establishment's own figures.
The provenance of that number is the point. This is not a tally from Palestinian officials, and it is not an activist count that a government spokesman can wave off as advocacy. The security establishment doing the recording answers to the same state whose army polices the territory where the attacks are recorded, and the same army whose soldiers, in the account from Qusra, arrived at one of those attacks in progress, prayed with the men carrying it out, and drove away [1].
A 63 percent year-over-year rise is what a pattern looks like in institutional data. It means the Qusra siege is not an aberration the system failed to catch once. It is one entry in a category the system is cataloguing at a rate of hundreds per half year, while a family that the record exists to count waits behind a blocked door. The beneficiary of each uncleared doorway is the settlement movement's position on the ground; the cost is carried by families like Hassan's, and by whoever fills the next of the 660 lines in the ledger.
As of Monday's report, the family remained trapped [1]. The record for the first half of 2026 already holds 660 entries like this one. This entry has a name, Youssef Hassan, a blocked entrance in Qusra, and behind it a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old in a house with the power cut.
