Palestinian Christian activist arrested for protesting seizure of family land by settlers

Israeli police have extended the detention of a Christian activist who was arrested for protesting the seizure of her family land by armed settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Alice Kisiya is scheduled to appear in court on Monday in a case related to the forcible seizure of her family-owned land and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in her hometown of Al-Makhrour.

On July 31, armed Israeli settlers, escorted by Israeli military forces, raided the Kisiya family’s land in Al-Makhrour and forcibly evicted her and other Palestinian Christian families living there.

Since then, members of the Kisiya family, accompanied by Palestinian human rights activists, have frequently returned to their ancestral land to protest their forcible eviction.

“We will stay here until we get our land back,” the 30-year-old Kisiya was quoted as saying before her arrest. “They took advantage of the war. They thought it would end in silence, but it didn’t.”

The expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank comes amid the Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which has already claimed more than 40,200 lives.

The Kisiya family is among the last remaining Christian families in the area. They have been threatened by illegal construction of settlements for years, and their home and restaurant were demolished in 2019.

Her family, which has owned the land for at least 40 years, has fought a protracted battle to reclaim their property, according to media reports.

“We have been in this struggle for more than 20 years. We are financially, psychologically, and physically exhausted. But we are not giving up. My goal is to take it all back,” Kisiya was quoted as saying by the Art Newspaper in 2023 after a lengthy court battle that cost them $135,000.

Importantly, Al-Makhrour was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014. In recent years, the expansion of settlements has put the heritage site at great risk.

Last week, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s extremist finance minister and a vocal proponent of settler-colonialism, approved the establishment of the Nahal Heletz settlement, which, according to rights groups, will destroy more than 150 acres of the UNESCO-listed Land of Olives and Vines.

“No anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist decision will stop the further development of the settlement. We will continue to fight the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state and establish facts on the ground,” Smotrich wrote on his X page following the announcement.

All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled that these settlements must end “as rapidly as possible.”

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