BURQA, West Bank: Jewish settlers torched three Palestinian cars and scrawled graffiti on a mosque in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday, in the latest incident in a rising trend of attacks, residents said.
Two months after Israeli and Palestinian negotiators revived stalled peace talks, the Palestinian government says incursions by hard-line settlers are becoming more frequent.
The phrase “Zion’s redemption,” a Star of David and the name of an Israeli soldier who was killed last month in the West Bank were spray-painted on the wall of the local mosque-cum-primary school in the village of Burqa.
“It’s the fifth or sixth attack on our village ... They do these things and leave, confident because they’re armed and they have the protection of the army,” Deputy Mayor Sayel Kanan told Reuters. “They weren’t content to just move onto our lands and keep quiet, but they attack us and chase our farmers away.”
The mosque was partially set ablaze in 2011, in an incident that villagers blamed on settlers from the neighboring outpost of Givat Assaf.
Settlers have attacked Palestinian communities 586 times so far this year, up from 370 in all of 2012, said Ghassan Daghlas, who tracks settler violence for the Palestinian Authority.
David Ha’ivri, a Jewish settler activist, did not dispute the villagers’ account of the latest incident but told Reuters that the settlers’ leadership “frowns on acts of violence and speaks out against such acts.”
“We can’t have full control over every individual in our community, just like anywhere else in the world,” he said. “We expect the police and security forces to have a special interest in seeing that this type of violence does not expand and that the people behind it are dealt with.”
Settlers vandalize West Bank mosque
