U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called settlers besieging a West Bank home of an American-Palestinian family "terrorists." A standoff in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has caught the attention of the Trump administration. A group of Israeli settlers besieged Palestinians in their homes for days. And one of those homes belongs to a U.S. citizen.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, took the unusual step of calling those Israeli settlers, quote, "terrorists." For more, we're joined now by NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv. So what exactly happened in this standoff in the West Bank? ESTRIN: It began at the start of the week.
Settlers set up a tent in front of two Palestinian homes on the edge of a village called Qusra. They cut off power lines. They cut off and vandalized water pipes to these homes, and the settlers simply stayed outside the homes round the clock for days, and the families were trapped inside.
Our NPR producer Nuha Musleh reached one of the Palestinians inside one of the homes, Qusai Abu Ridi. ESTRIN: He says they are still besieged. They lack electricity, water, food, medicine.
And his brother who owns the house is a U.S. citizen. He lives in Ohio, and he's been appealing to the U.S. embassy to help. And explain how the U.S. has helped, at least so far, or tried to.
ESTRIN: Well, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, posted on X that the U.S. asked Israel to send in forces to remove that group of settlers, and he called those Israeli settlers, as you mentioned, terrorists - very unusual language for Huckabee. He's a pro-Israel conservative. He believes Jews have a biblical right to settle the West Bank.
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