Israeli settlers attack West Bank Palestinian community, burn homes

KHIRBET AL-TUBA, Palestinian Territories - Israeli settlers attacked a small Palestinian community in the West Bank, injuring people, destroying homes and smashing their power source, the military and residents said on Aug 6, in the latest in a spate of violent confrontations.

AFP journalists in remote Khirbet al-Tuba saw buildings blackened by fire and smoke, the interiors of three homes completely burned and graffiti in Hebrew spray-painted on remaining structures.

The dozen solar panels the isolated southern community relies on for power had also been smashed to render them unusable.

The Israeli military said it “strongly condemned” the raid and that it had responded after “homes being set on fire and Palestinians being attacked in the area by Israeli civilians” late on Aug 5.

“Several Palestinians were injured, among them a girl and a woman. Several structures were also burned,” the military said.

“The suspects fled before the forces arrived.”

Radwan Abu Jundi, whose house was torched, told AFP that about 40 settlers attacked the hamlet at around 10pm.

“The settlers started throwing stones. We rushed to protect the women, but they got to my wife and daughter and beat them,” he said.

“Then they started spraying something and setting the room on fire. The pictures tell the whole story.”

Locals said that five people were wounded in the attack, including Abu Jundi’s wife and daughter, as well as another child.

“From the moment the attack began until daybreak, we spent the whole night standing here, putting out the fires and helping the injured,” Ali Awad, another resident whose son was injured, told AFP.

Violence by Israeli settlers towards Palestinians in the West Bank has persisted for years, but recent months have seen a surge in attacks.

Excluding Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, some 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank among some three million Palestinians.

Khirbet al-Tuba is a community of about 100 people in the West Bank region of Masafer Yatta, where shepherding communities face frequent settler violence and home demolitions by the military, which has declared parts of the area an army firing zone.

The army said it would investigate, but Palestinians and rights groups complain that such investigations rarely lead to prosecutions, and that violent settlers are able to act with impunity – and the army’s support when clashes break out.

“When we used to file complaints with the Israeli police over previous attacks, the Israeli army would come and arrest the (Palestinian) residents,” local activist Osama Makhamreh told AFP on Aug 6.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which has been occupied since 1967, are illegal under international law.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, has drastically increased the number of settlements and settlement outposts in the Palestinian territory. AFP