Even the United States is now criticising Israel's ongoing settler violence in the West Bank as Benjamin Netanyahu, once the 'Trump whisperer' becomes the Trump ignorer. (Reuters: Ronen Zvulun)
Records of the village of Qusra, just south of Nablus in the Occupied West Bank, go back to Ottoman tax registers of 1596. There has been documentation of its existence and that of its inhabitants ever since.
Documenting a place, and a community, and the events that occur there, is always important.
But documenting Qusra has made it one of the stand-outs in the wider story of Israeli actions against Palestinian people which, amid the noise of Donald Trump's chaotic war against Iran, have only escalated in 2026.
Earlier this month, Israeli settlers besieged three houses in Qusra telling the families that lived there they had to leave because the settlers were going to take their land.
The settlers cut off the water and electricity to the houses. They blocked the roads.
Such actions are not unusual in the West Bank. Nor are they by any means the worst that happen there.
The West Bank community of Qusra has been the site of repeated settler attacks on Palestinian residents. (ABC News: Hamish Harty)
Last month settlers set fire to the village's newly constructed mosque after an earlier clash in another village in which four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers died, after a group of settlers entered an area of the West Bank for an "unauthorised hike", according to the Israeli military.
But the besieging of the three houses and their 15 inhabitants — which has continued with the UN allowed to deliver supplies — struck a chord in the international community, and particularly in the United States.
That was possibly because one of the houses that has now come under siege belongs to a Palestinian-American, Loai Ridi.
But it is mostly because the international media have been able to document what has been going on in real time, in real pictures.
The contrast with Gaza could not be more stark.
In Gaza, where the international media has not been allowed to independently enter since October 7, 2023, the killing of more than 70,000 people according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the wounding of many more, and the continuing appalling living conditions of around two million people on a small strip of land where the majority of buildings have been flattened, occupies a strange space in history where what we see and what are told bear little resemblance to each other.
The lack of international media access leaves it in a situation in which almost every event is contested, but the Israeli ban prevents the media from testing and filtering out false claims and information.
