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West Bank council head says he ‘despises’ settler rioters
The head of the Samaria Regional Council, an Israeli governing body in the occupied West Bank, has claimed the Israeli settlers who carried out a deadly rampage in the Palestinian village of Jit on Thursday night – which left one person dead and about a dozen injured – were not from his area.
“We know that this is a WhatsApp group of fringe, violent youth, most of whom are not even from Samaria. I despise them like most of the country,” Yossi Dagan told Israel’s Kan radio.
“I am in constant contact with the police, the [Israeli military], and with the security establishment, and also with residents who called yesterday and requested I talk with the police because they felt torn apart by this violence,” he said.
Israeli human rights activists and international legal experts have accused state officials in Israel – at ministerial and regional council level – of supporting and directing settler violence against Palestinians, which has been continuing for years.
Settler attacks part of Israel’s ‘policy of ethnic cleansing’: ex-PLO leader
The deadly Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank on Thursday night are “part of Israel’s policy of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”, said Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian political leader and a former executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
In a post on social media, Ashrawi said attacks by “Israeli settler thugs” on Palestinian villagers “has become a pattern in the occupied West Bank”. “They are armed, financed, protected” and “generally supported by the army and the government” in Israel, she said.
Financed by donors from the US as well
Former State Department director questions support for Israel’s Netzah Yehuda
Former US State Department human rights official Charles Blaha says Washington’s decision to continue funding the Israeli military’s Netzah Yehuda Battalion is “inexplicable” when looking at the evidence of the unit’s human rights abuses.
“It really calls into question how much value the department gives to the lives of Palestinian Americans,” he said.
Palestinian Authority slams ‘terrorist settler gangs’
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has said “the armed collective attack” by settlers on the village of Jit in the occupied West Bank is “organised state terrorism”. The ministry condemned the brutal attack committed by “the terrorist settler gangs” on the village located in the east of the city of Qalqilya.
“We demand the imposition of deterrent sanctions on the racist colonial system, the dismantling of the terrorist settler militias, and the prosecution of their members,” the statement said.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said a 23-year-old Palestinian man – identified as Mahmoud Abdel Qader Sadda – was killed in the settler violence and another Palestinian suffered critical gunshot wounds to the chest in the attack on the village.
