By Ali Sawafta
JIT, West Bank (Reuters) – Muawiya Sedeh, a 38 year-old father of five was at home in the West Bank village of Jit when his house was torched by a band of Jewish settlers, some masked and wielding Molotov cocktails, who stormed in on Thursday night.
He said he escaped with his family with only minutes to spare. When he returned, he said the settlers were jeering and taunting him, saying “We will come back and kill you!” and telling him to go to Jordan or Syria.
Local people said more than 100 people took part in the attack, many wearing masks and clad in black, and appeared well-coordinated, dividing into groups armed with guns and others throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.
“I was lucky, it was a matter of minutes between life and death,” Sedeh said.
Video shared on social media showed cars and houses ablaze and Palestinian emergency services reported that a 22-year-old man was killed by gunfire from the settlers.
The Jit attack was larger than recent raids by West Bank settlers but was hardly unique, with violence against Palestinian villages already on the rise as settlement building has spread unchecked across the West Bank.
Since the start of the Gaza war, they have picked up even more rapidly. Between Oct 7, when Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel, and this week, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, or around four per day.
Of these, around 120 led to Palestinian deaths or injuries and around 1,000 damaged Palestinian property.
Thursday’s attack took place as negotiators met in Doha for last-ditch talks aimed at halting the fighting in Gaza and heading off the looming threat of a wider regional war involving Iran and its proxies.
There was swift condemnation by senior Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who promised an investigation, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and even Bezalel Smotrich, the hardline head of a pro-settler party, who has dismissed such incidents in the past.
The heads of two West Bank settler associations, the Samaria Council and the Kedumim Council also condemned the attack, which, like Smotrich, who blamed “criminals”, they suggested was carried out by groups from outside the area.
“Those who come to create disorder and violence – don’t come to Samaria, you are not welcome here,” they said, using a Biblical name used by Israelis for part of the West Bank.
DELAYED RESPONSE
Jit, located between the flashpoint cities of Nablus and Qalqilyah, in the northern West Bank, has not seen settler attacks on a comparable scale in the recent past, residents said, but they said there had been tensions as nearby settlements have grown and expanded.
Palestinians in the West Bank have regularly complained of the growing violence and strength of settler incursions in Palestinian areas like Huwara or Burqa, which have seen repeated attacks and there was a feeling of shock in the village.
“We’ve seen attacks before but not in such a brutal and organized way,” said Hassan Orman, a resident who saw the attack. “What happened wasn’t about four or five settlers who just wanted to carry out an attack. What happened is something organized, they planned for it for days, they had weapons, tear gas, pepper spray, knives, all kinds of weapons.”
Although the Israeli military condemned the attack, and said it had arrested one person, local people said it took around an hour for the first security forces to arrive at the scene.
“If anyone from the village goes towards the settlements, they’re there in minutes,” said 40-year-old Saddam Kahder.
Palestinians and rights groups regularly accuse Israeli forces of standing by as attacks take place and even joining in themselves and legal action against violent settlers is extremely uncommon.
“How can these terrorist gangs mobilize 100 of their members … and attack a Palestinian village if they did not feel protected,” the Palestinian foreign ministry said in a statement.
In a report from January, Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group that monitors settler violence, said an analysis of 1,664 investigation files between 2005-23 showed almost 94% were closed without an indictment.
But as global pressure has mounted on Israel over the Gaza war, now in its 11th month, the patience of Israel’s allies, including the United States, has been increasingly strained by incidents which cause deep anger in their home countries.
Many, including the United States have begun imposing sanctions on individuals and face pressure to do more and to curb the expansion of settlements on land the Palestinians want as the core of a future independent state, a key part of the two-state solution favoured by Western countries.
Most countries deem the settlements, built on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, as illegal.
British Foreign Minister David Lammy and his French counterpart Stephane Sejourne, who spoke with Israeli counterparts during a joint visit to Jerusalem on Friday, both condemned the attack.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has said there will be a swift investigation. I hope that that investigation can ensure that those who have engaged in this settler violence over the course of the last 24 hours are brought to justice,” Lammy said.
(Additional reporting by Raneen Sawafta, Sinan Abu Mayzer in Jit, James Mackenzie in Jerusalem; writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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