Israeli settlers storm West Bank village, drawing rare rebukes from Israeli officials
Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians have surged in the West Bank, but a riot Thursday in the village of Jit stood out for drawing rapid and unusual rebukes from Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition government includes West Bank settlers in top positions.
The Israeli military condemned the attack and said that dozens of Israeli civilians, including some wearing masks, had set fire to vehicles and hurled rocks and firebombs. It said that its forces, along with Israel border police, were dispatched to the scene and dispersed the rioters by firing shots into the air and “removing the Israeli civilians from the town.”
The Palestinian Authority said that one Palestinian had been shot dead during the attack and that another was critically injured. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports of a fatality and that it had opened an investigation with other security agencies. One rioter was arrested and transferred to police for questioning.
The prime minister’s office said in a statement that Netanyahu took the riots seriously and pledged to find and prosecute those responsible for “any criminal act.”
The attack also drew condemnation from the United States and the European Union on Friday. Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he was “appalled” by the violence. “These attacks must stop and the criminals be held to account,” he said in a post on social media.
As the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas has stretched into its 11th month, Israel has increased its military activity against what it terms suspected terrorism in the occupied West Bank, and violent settler attacks have surged at the same time.
Far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government — particularly Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, who are both West Bank settlers — have espoused divisive rhetoric and advanced policies to expand Israel’s hold on the territory.
The West Bank is home to about 2.7 million Palestinians and more than 500,000 settlers. Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israelis have since settled there with both tacit and explicit government approval. The international community largely considers settlements illegal, and many outposts also violate Israeli laws.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tracks violent incidents in the West Bank, said in its latest update Wednesday that Israeli settlers had carried out 25 attacks against Palestinians in the previous week. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that set off the war in Gaza, the agency has recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property.
“There has been an uptick in vigilante attacks by a minority of settlers,” David Makovsky, director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel relations at the Washington Institute, said in an interview. “The West Bank is a tinderbox.”
Few attacks, however, have generated the kind of immediate approbation from Israeli officials that followed the storming of Jit.
In July, a departing Israeli general issued a harsh rebuke of the government’s policies in the West Bank and condemned rising “nationalist crime” by Jewish settlers. Retired Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuks, the former chief of Israel’s Central Command, said in a speech that the actions of a violent minority threatened Israel’s security, undermined Israel’s reputation internationally and sowed fear among Palestinians.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressed a similar sentiment Thursday in response to the riot in Jit. “This is not our way and certainly not the way of Torah and Judaism,” Herzog said in a post on social media. He accused an “extremist minority” of settlers of harming Israel’s standing in the international community during an “especially sensitive and difficult time.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
