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By Zahid Rabbani
The Israeli army and settlers have killed 67 Palestinians since the start of 2023, including 13 children. Palestinian Ministry of Health says the death toll is the highest in the past 22 years. The year 2022 was the sixth year of a consecutive annual increase in the number of Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank.
Disturbing evidence of Israeli forces frequently facilitating, supporting, and participating in settler attacks makes it difficult to discern between Israeli settler and state violence.
Armed and masked Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in their homes, attacking children on their way to school, destroying property and burning olive groves, and terrorizing entire communities with complete impunity.
Israeli settlers have carried out at least 300 attacks, including shootings and arson, in a rampage through Palestinian villages in the Nablus area of the occupied West Bank, what the Palestinian officials describe as a pogrom.
In the settler rampage across the villages of Huwara, Zaatara, Burin, and Asira al-Qibliya — all south of Nablus, at least 390 Palestinians were injured, the Palestinian Red Crescent says, adding that the majority received wounds from tear gas fired by the Israeli army as well as smoke inhalation from widespread fires set by the settlers.
Palestinian media reported stabbings and attacks with metal rods and rocks. The Palestinian Ministry of Health said one person was in hospital after being beaten in the head with a rock, causing fractures to the skull. Another person suffered a beating with a metal rod to the face.
Residents of Huwara describe the violence as barbaric. We witnessed a new level of colonizing settler crimes, where they aggressively attacked everything, shops, people, supermarkets, houses, trees, cars, and car garages. They tried to enter the houses. They burned almost everything. According to reports, the settlers were 100 percent protected by the Israeli army.
Settlers set at least 30 Palestinian homes and 100 cars on fire, Ghassan Daghlas, the Palestinian Authority’s head of settlement monitoring for the northern West Bank says. The attack was unprecedented in terms of size and the short amount of time in which it took place, adding that the Israeli army was a partner in the attacks.
The violence has been widely condemned by local and international politicians, NGOs, and human rights groups. A number of foreign governments, including the United States and France, also issued condemnations of the attacks.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says international intervention is necessary to hold the occupation authorities and stop them from creating scenes of burning houses and cars, assault on citizens, attack on ambulances transporting patients and injured, and blockade of fire trucks from reaching burned houses.
Shtayyeh added that we hold the occupation authorities fully responsible for these heinous crimes, which reflect a systematic policy practiced by the Israeli government, whose ministers demonstrate their support for those crimes in violation of international laws. He proposed the formation of a ministerial committee to compensate the affected people.
The Ramallah-based Al Haq rights groups said the attack was the result of decades-long impunity enjoyed by Israel and settlers for international crimes committed against Palestinians.
Sami Abu Shahadeh, a Palestinian politician in the Israeli parliament says that the pogrom that took place in Huwara is a consequence of the Israeli government’s Jewish supremacist political platform.
Israeli settler attacks have consistently been rising for the past six years. Attacks on villages in the Nablus area, where there is a heavy settler concentration, have been increasing and becoming more organized over the past year.
Many of these incidents recorded on video show the attacks taking place under the protection or in coordination with the Israeli army, sometimes with soldiers and settlers shooting side by side.
