“Governments need to act urgently so that the Israeli government does not continue to act as if it has a green light to commit further atrocities,” said a researcher at Human Rights Watch
Stephen Prager
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to meet with US President Donald Trump this week, Israeli soldiers stormed into several villages across the occupied West Bank on Monday, expanding a rolling campaign of violence waged by illegal settlers in recent days.
Over the weekend, armed settlers rampaged across more than a dozen Palestinian communities, torching homes and farmland, vandalizing buildings and cars, and burning a pair of mosques in Qusra and Kour.
They were acts of retaliation after two armed Israelis were killed while helping dozens of settlers carry out what Palestinian physician and political leader Mustafa Barghouti described as a “terrorist attack” in the village of Tell, near Nablus in the northern West Bank. That assault killed four Palestinians.
Tell was one of dozens of Palestinian communities to be attacked in recent weeks as part of a campaign of escalating settler violence egged on by the Israeli government as it seeks to cement total control over the West Bank.
