RAMALLAH, West Bank: The Palestinian Authority said yesterday that it will ask the UN Security Council for an urgent meeting to discuss attacks by Jewish occupiers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
“We will ask the Security Council to send an armed force to protect our Palestinian people, particularly in Hebron,” acting Foreign Minister Riad Malki told reporters in Ramallah after meeting with foreign diplomats in the central West Bank city and in Jerusalem.
He said the Palestinian Authority will ask the Council to demand the removal of all occupiers from the divided city, and that those responsible for going on a rampage against Palestinians in Hebron be brought to justice.
Jewish occupiers, reacting to the forced evacuation of a disputed house by Israeli authorities, have been attacking Palestinian civilians and property in the southern West Bank city, throwing stones, lighting fires and desecrating graves. On Thursday, they even fired at Palestinians.
The violence followed an Israeli court order that the occupiers leave a building they have been occupying in the city since March 2007.
Malki said he held the Israeli government and army responsible for the occupiers’ actions, accusing the army of not doing anything to stop them.
Malki said the violence by the occupiers left 30 Palestinians injured, including five with gunshot wounds, one of them critically. He was transferred in an Israeli Army helicopter to a hospital inside Israel.
The occupiers also set fire to nine cars and caused damage to dozens of other cars, as well as setting five houses, two mosques and an ambulance on fire, said Malki in a final estimate of the damage caused by the attacks on Thursday.
“We have asked the diplomats to convey the seriousness of the situation in Hebron to their governments,” he said, adding the occupiers were “terrorizing” the city’s Palestinian population.
Israeli police were on alert yesterday after the occupiers vowed revenge for Thursday’s forced evacuation. The occupiers plastered pamphlets on walls, calling for a “week of revenge.”
The occupiers also vowed to continue their method of “wearing out” the authorities and security forces by returning again and again to a number of buildings in Hebron from which they have been evacuated in the past.
They briefly reoccupied an abandoned building and market in the city center late Thursday, until they were forced out by police.
A leader of the occupiers told Israel Radio yesterday that the American Jew who had purchased the evacuated “House of Contention” in Hebron had telephoned him and pledged to buy more buildings in the city to cement the Jewish presence in the “city of our forefathers.” Hebron is divided into Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled parts under a 1998 agreement.
