Tuesday, January 14, 2025

NAKBA 2.0

Illegal Israeli settlers continue West Bank violence



 Palestinians walk near the UNRWA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency, boys school in the Deheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem, West Bank, on January 5, 2025. 
 Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI | License Photo

Jan. 12 (UPI) -- Illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank are continuing to engage in violence against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian enclave. Though violence by Israeli forces and illegal settlers in the West Bank has been ongoing for years, there has been a marked uptick in the past year.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported last week, during the first week of the year, the illegal settlers injured 18 Palestinians as Israeli occupation authorities demolished the homes of some 50 people as punitive measures.

Between January 2023 and October 7, 2023, the day the Palestinian militia Hamas in Gaza attacked Israel, some 204 Palestinians had already been killed in the West Bank alone with just eight deaths attributed to illegal settlers, data provided by the United Nations shows.

Some 816 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank alone since October 2023, of those, 13 have been directly attributed to illegal settlers, a sharp increase. Multiple U.S. citizens have also been killed in the West Bank.

Just 358 Israelis, excluding those killed by Hamas or attributed to Palestinians in Gaza amid the war, have been recorded by OCHA since the database began in 2008. Of those, 25 were recorded since the Israel-Gaza war began in 2023.

Last month, OCHA noted that 2024 had the highest number of incidents of Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the office began keeping records almost two decades ago, averaging "nearly four per day" throughout the entire year.

Those incidents included violent attacks causing injury and death, arson and the destruction of fruit trees impacting Palestinian farming. Some 4,700 people were internally displaced in the West Bank last year, more than half citing Israeli violence as the cause.

Bands of violent Israeli settlers on Sunday attacked Palestinians in the village of Madama, south of Nablus, and near the village of Al-Funduq, the official Palestinian News and Information Agency, better known as WAFA, reported.

Abdullah Ziyada, head of the Madama Village Council, said that Israeli settlers came from the nearby illegal settlement of Yitzhar to attack Palestinian homes, which led to Israeli troops storming the village to safeguard them from Palestinians seeking to stop them.

In the attack near Al-Funduq, Israeli settlers under the protection of Israeli forces threw stones at passing vehicles, shattering the windows of several cars. Though no injuries were reported, such actions in the United States in the past have led to murder charges. It remains unclear if the settlers would face any punishment for their alleged violence.

The United States government, which occasionally criticizes Israel's inaction to prevent West Bank settler violence, has done little else to persuade its ally to end it apart from some minor sanctions.

Under international law, the construction of Israeli settlements on the land is illegal and has led Palestinian resistance fighters to occasionally rise up against the continued occupation of the West Bank in clashes with Israeli authorities and security forces of the Palestinian Authority, which rules much of the West Bank.

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