Israeli soldiers evacuate Palestinians besieged by settlers

**Valerie Sanderson** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson, and at 15 Hours GMT on Thursday the 13th of August, these are our main stories. Palestinians say the Israeli military have evacuated several houses in a village in the West Bank, where Israeli settlers have been besieging Palestinian families. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, visits an island claimed by Japan, drawing sharp criticism from Tokyo. Romania shuts down its only nuclear power plant because of low water levels in the Danube.
Also in this podcast, why vultures are becoming endangered.

**Stella Egwe** (0:39)
Haunting vulture, to use them in what we call belief-based use, and that's the use for vulture in traditional medicine, or what we call voodoo.

**Valerie Sanderson** (0:50)
And Cameroon and Malawi make the final on Sunday of the Women's Africa Cup of Nations.
We begin the podcast in the occupied West Bank, in the village of Kuzra, south of Nablus. There have been growing tensions there all week after a group of illegal Israeli settlers surrounded the residential compound of two Palestinian families on Sunday, blocking the entrance and exit. The families told us the settlers had cut off their electricity and water supply. Additional Israeli forces have been sent to remove Israeli settlers today, and the soldiers reportedly have told about a dozen Palestinian households to leave their properties. One of those evacuated is Kouze Abu Ridi. His brother, who owns the property, is Palestinian American.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:44)
The army came to us and told me, you have half an hour to take the belongings you need and leave the house. I asked him, what do you mean, leave the house? He replied, there's a military order here from the Central Command Officer who is with us. Your house and Yusuf's house are among the homes that we want to turn into military posts. They left us with X House, who is Yusuf's brother.
His house is one of the homes that had been under siege.

**Valerie Sanderson** (2:06)
A woman who asked us not to use her name was visiting one of the houses at the center of the story just before the siege of the property by Israeli settlers began. She described how the IDF evacuated the families from the compound earlier on Thursday.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:22)
At around maybe 8.3 in the morning, we have all been waking up very abruptly from the military. At least 10, 15 militaries were standing in front of the house, and they asked us to evacuate the house in 30 minutes, and we have been moved to another house inside the gate.
There has been no arrest there whatsoever to settlers, and now from the house, we can still see at least 10 of them still harassing us and patrolling the house outside without the army doing anything about it.

**Valerie Sanderson** (2:56)
David Mensah is a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. He says arrests will take place.

**David Mensah** (3:03)
We don't condone violence against innocent people. We're a country of law and order.
Where there is wrongdoing, we act against it and we investigate it and we arrest those responsible. What here is so often missing from this discussion is that these crimes, and they are crimes, they're committed by a tiny extremist minority, maybe only 150 in number. They're juvenile delinquents. Very often, they're not even from the area.

**Valerie Sanderson** (3:30)
The American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has described the group of settlers involved as Israeli terrorists. He wrote on social media that there was no excuse for such thuggish behaviour.
Our correspondent, John Donison, is in the village of Kuzra and spoke to Rebecca Kersby.

**John Donison** (3:47)
The Israeli army, overnight, they went in with bulldozers and they demolished this small outpost, I guess, tent encampment that these settlers had set up close to these Palestinian houses, which still remain under siege. These soldiers then went inside the houses and we've spoken to the families inside and told us that they were all moved from two of the houses into a third house, so the families are all now in one house. They haven't been told to leave entirely yet, but that is what they fear and they still say that they are low on water. I think the electricity, certainly if it's not cut off for the moment, it's been cut off for much of the last few days. At the same time, we've just been down into Kusra village itself. We spoke to a guy who was one of about 11 families, who this morning, the Israeli soldiers went in, simply went into their houses, told them to get out, and they have seized those houses for a period of several hours, they were told, but still they'd not been allowed back in. So they have taken over those houses for what they said were military purposes.