Despite the increase in violence, Israeli forces continue their practice of not intervening to stop the attacks in most cases, and often actively join in, B’Tselem rights group says.
Imagine white supremacists routinely invading suburbs and rural villages to terrorize Black people. Now imagine these attacks growing so extreme that white supremacists can even take over the homes and land of those Black people, simply because they can, knowing the authorities will turn a blind eye… That’s what Israel does year after year after year to Palestinians – while US politicians from both parties continue to send Israel over $10 million per day…
As Israel criticizes Palestinians for their legal resistance against an illegal occupation, illegal Israeli settlers attack Palestinians on a daily basis – often with protection from the Israeli military – and go unpunished. Sometimes they destroy crops, sometimes vehicles; sometimes it’s graffiti; this week a member of the Israeli parliament called for open violence, and settlers obeyed.
Thursday morning, Israelis forces killed a young Palestinian man in a predawn raid on the Balata refugee camp. Hours later an Israeli settler committed a car-ramming attack against a Palestinian man near Ramallah, killing him.
Fifteen-year-old Tareq Zubeidi, a victim of settler violence this week. The settlers kicked him, he says, as he lay on the ground, then placed him on the hood of the car, lashing him to it with a chain. At the supposedly evacuated settlement of Homesh last week, a Palestinian teen was seized by settlers and…
Tensions have been running especially high in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories, as Israel violently clamps down on Palestinian protests against occupation and land confiscation and other human rights violations. Read these short reports, all from Friday, May 6th.
A Jewish Israeli eyewitness to this week’s anti-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem recalls the sights, sounds, and smells of racism.
Jewish Israeli extremists arrived ready to rumble Thursday night, in a planned protest march to “restore Jewish dignity” by “breaking the faces of Arabs.” Israeli forces supported their efforts.
Settler violence in the Palestinian West Bank: Said Awwad has filed three trespassing complaints this year, but the police asked him to ‘bring proof.’ When he tried to take a picture of men intruding on his land – settlers he knew by name from the nearby outpost – they attacked him, his wife and their children ages 1 to 15.
The unprecedented number and intensity of Israeli settler attacks – often with the complicity of the Israeli military – during the past few months are raising fears that the situation may escalate out of control.