Palestinian Homes, Vehicles Set on Fire by Armed Israeli Settlers
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Dozens of armed Israeli settlers raided a village north of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah under the regime forces’ protection on Saturday.
They shot at Palestinians and set their houses and vehicles on fire.
The raid was carried out in Umm Safa village, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency reported.
Armed with rifles, Israeli settlers opened indiscriminate fire "at everything they came across," the report said, damaging an ambulance and injuring a paramedic, who was moving a patient in urgent condition to a hospital.
Mohammad Radi, a Palestinian TV cameraman, told Wafa that gunshots were fired at him and his colleague as they were covering the terrorist attack by nearly 70 fanatic Israeli settlers on the village. Radi added that one gunshot directly hit and damaged their camera.
"We arrived in Umm Safa. There were dozens of settlers. They fired at the village. The moment (one of) the settlers saw us filming, he shot in our direction. Two bullets went into the camera, then the camera blew up from the shooting. Thank god we are safe," he told Reuters.
"What happened today has been going on since Thursday. Settlers tried to set up a settlement on village land and (Palestinian) families have been stopping them for two days. ... It looks like the settlers didn't like it, so they attacked us this morning from many sides of the village," a Palestinian villager was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The attack came after a day earlier, dozens of Palestinians were injured by settlers who went on a violent rampage across the West Bank under strict protection of Israeli forces.
One Palestinian sustained a gunshot wound while many others suffered suffocation as the settlers tried to storm the city of Dayr Dibwan, east of Ramallah, on Friday.
Another group of settlers hurled stones towards Palestinian vehicles in the al-Fahs area, south of the city of al-Khalil in the southern West Bank, smashing their windshields.
On Thursday, a group of settlers stormed the village of Urif south of the city of Nablus in northern West Bank. The attackers then forced their way into a local mosque and vandalized it before ripping the pages of a copy of the Holy Qur'an and throwing it into the street.
The act of desecration has prompted far-and-wide outrage and condemnation from across the Muslim world.
More than a dozen Palestinians have also been killed in violence staged either by the Israeli military or armed settlers.
The fatalities included a Palestinian man, who was killed on Wednesday when hundreds of settlers went on a rampage across the village of Turmus Ayya in north-central West Bank.
Israel has stepped up its settlement expansion activities since last December when Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power as the prime minister of the regime’s most far-right cabinet.
More than 700,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
The international community considers all those settlements illegal under international law as they have been constructed on occupied land.