Yemen condemns escalating Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank

Spread the Word

Yemen has condemned the escalating attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, singling out the recent violence in the town of Qusra in Nablus Governorate and holding the Israeli occupation forces fully responsible for the assaults.

In a statement carried by the state news agency Saba, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reaffirmed what it called Yemen’s categorical rejection of these crimes and practices, describing them as part of Israel’s continuing occupation policies and as violations of international law and of the rights of the Palestinian people. The ministry called on the international community to assume its responsibilities by working to halt settler attacks and hold those responsible to account, and to ensure protection for Palestinians and their legitimate rights.

The events in Qusra drew wide international attention in mid-August. News organisations reported that settlers had besieged Palestinian families inside their homes in the village, and that Israeli forces blocked activists attempting to reach the families. A senior United States diplomat described the siege as a horrific act of terror, and Washington pressed Israel’s prime minister to issue his own condemnation. Israel’s ambassador to the United States publicly condemned the settler violence, while the prime minister had not commented at the time the reports were published.

The United Nations and the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued their own condemnations of the siege. Qusra has been a recurring flashpoint in recent years, and rights organisations monitoring the occupied West Bank have documented repeated confrontations there between residents and settlers from nearby outposts.

Accountability is the point on which the competing accounts diverge most sharply. Israeli monitoring organisations have reported for years that the large majority of police investigations into settler attacks on Palestinians are closed without charges being brought, a pattern Palestinian officials cite as evidence that the violence is tolerated. Israeli authorities reject that reading, saying they oppose vigilante violence and prosecute offenders where evidence allows, and Israeli officials condemned the Qusra siege in unusually direct terms.

Yemen’s statement follows a long-standing position. Successive Yemeni governments have identified the Palestinian cause as a central commitment of their foreign policy, and the internationally recognised government has continued to issue such statements from Aden even while managing a war at home. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently been led by Dr Afrah Al-Zouba, whose appointment as Yemen’s first female foreign minister was welcomed by the United Kingdom at the Security Council this month.

The politics of the statement are not only external. The Houthi movement has made Gaza and the wider Palestinian question the organising theme of its public messaging since late 2023, and used it to justify attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. A condemnation issued through the recognised government’s foreign ministry asserts that support for Palestinians is not the exclusive property of any one faction inside Yemen, and it does so without endorsing attacks on merchant vessels that the government has repeatedly denounced.

Settler violence in the occupied West Bank has risen sharply since October 2023, a trend documented by United Nations monitoring bodies and by Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion finding that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that it should be brought to an end, an opinion that carries legal weight but no enforcement mechanism.

Yemen’s condemnation arrived during a week in which the country’s own crisis was before the Security Council. At a session on 13 August, the UN Special Envoy, Hans Grundberg, told members that Yemen faces a more serious risk of returning to large-scale conflict than at any point since the truce mediated by the United Nations in 2022, and warned that the war expanding across the Middle East had reached Yemen’s shores.

That warning followed missile and drone attacks on the Red Sea port city of Mokha, in which the Yemeni military said seven people were killed and about thirty wounded, and a missile strike on the cargo ship Tihamah as it approached port nearby. Yemeni officials said four crew members and two Yemeni rescuers died in the maritime attack. Pakistan’s representative told the Council that three Pakistani and one Indonesian crew member were among the dead.

The humanitarian backdrop in Yemen is severe by any measure. Tom Fletcher, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, told the Council that six million people are experiencing emergency levels of deprivation, the highest number recorded anywhere in the world, that nearly eleven million women and girls require humanitarian support and that the country’s humanitarian appeal is barely a fifth funded.

Statements of the kind Yemen issued this week carry no enforcement weight, and they join a steady flow of similar condemnations from Arab governments, European states and United Nations bodies. Their function is to register a position and to keep a subject on the diplomatic record. For Yemen, issuing one at a moment when its own territory, ports and shipping lanes are under attack is also a reminder that its foreign ministry continues to operate as the voice of a state whose institutions remain fragmented by more than a decade of war.