If you’re Palestinian, something as small as a visit to the grocery store or as urgent as an emergency visit to the hospital becomes an hourslong journey of humiliating checkpoints, iron gates and military outposts. International human rights groups have called this system apartheid. The settlers who attack our villages — radicals with racist ideology toward Palestinians — are often armed. Being harassed by them has become a daily occurrence for many; walking in your front yard a death wish for others.

Just a month before the siege on my village, a Palestinian man in a neighboring village, Jalud, reported that Israeli settlers had seized the house he was building for his newly engaged son to start his married life. Years of hard work and money gone in an instant.

Israeli settlers follow a playbook: They build outposts in Palestinian villages that are considered illegal even under Israeli law. Those outposts become springboards from which settlers menace Palestinian communities, using tactics that Amnesty International declared to be carried out “with full political, legal and financial state backing.” These outposts are often retroactively legalized by the Israeli government. Then, the Israeli army will declare the Palestinian area a “closed military zone,” ostensibly to keep the settlers out but also effectively controlling all aspects of life there. And eventually, under these absurd conditions, many Palestinians are forced to flee our own homes. This is part of why more than 36,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been forcibly displaced in one year alone.

Since I arrived at my house a few weeks ago, I’ve awakened to settlers walking freely in the hills around my property. I can hear Israeli soldiers exchanging jokes with the very settlers who they claim to be impeding. The Israeli military dispersed some of the settlers and said it had detained one Israeli. But the settlers came back and many have remained under the military’s watch. The prime minister and president of Israel have condemned their actions, and the police has made arrests elsewhere in the West Bank. But in Qusra, there have been no reported arrests of the settlers assaulting our homes, while the Israeli military reportedly arrested six Palestinians before releasing them. Because the Israeli army declared my own land a “closed military zone,” it can take days to get food to our house. If I try to take a walk on my property, Israeli soldiers yell at me to stay inside, threatening to use force if I step foot in my own front yard.

I am effectively a prisoner in my own home.

The U.S. Embassy, and my elected representatives, have helped mitigate the situation. Ambassador Mike Huckabee described these settlers as “terrorists.” My congressional representative in Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, helped ensure my safe travel upon arrival, and has checked in on me regularly. And on one occasion, when my relatives were trying to bring me food and water and were held for hours at an Israeli checkpoint, the U.S. embassy intervened so they could pass.