Palestine’s West Bank villages torched in violent clashes
Merhej Yousef winced as he surveyed the charred wreckage of his son’s taxi, one of dozens of vehicles torched the previous night by a mob of Jewish settlers in his remote Palestinian village.
“I was on the rooftop and when I saw the smoke I came down to see what was happening,” Mr Yousef, a retired taxi driver, told The Telegraph. “They were burning down everything.”
On Sunday night, hundreds of settlers descended on Huwara, a village in the northern West Bank, seeking revenge for a terrorist attack earlier that day in which two Israeli brothers were shot dead in their car.
Eyewitnesses said the rioters forced their way through a set of gates and into a courtyard where they set fire to piles of vehicles before moving on to torch homes and shops in Huwara and other nearby villages.
The mob also killed a 37-year-old Palestinian man, Sameh Aqtash, reportedly by shooting him in the stomach. According to his relatives, Mr Aqtash was an aid worker who just days earlier had been on deployment in earthquake-stricken Turkey.
Sunday night’s riot came as tensions neared boiling point over a series of Israeli army raids and Palestinian terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank which have killed dozens this year.
It also broke out just as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were pledging at a summit in Jordan to de-escalate those tensions, a prospect that now seems unlikely.
To make matters even more volatile, a senior Israeli minister appeared to endorse Sunday night’s rampage by “liking” a post on social media which had called for Huwara to be “erased”. The minister, Bezalel Smotrich, later clarified that he did not want Israelis to take the law into their own hands.
Huwara was almost deserted on Monday, with only soldiers and a handful of residents still on the streets. Houses near the torched courtyard had been blackened by flames which also melted air conditioners on the sides of residential buildings.
The Israeli military, which has full control over the part of the West Bank where Huwara is located, was tightly monitoring access to the area to prevent further clashes. However, at one point on Monday a car festooned with Israeli flags pulled up near the rows of burnt cars and its driver jeered at Palestinian residents before speeding off again.
“It might be normal for me but it’s not normal for my grandchildren,” said Mr Youssef, who at the age of 73 has lived through several Holy Land wars and two Palestinian intifadas (“uprisings”) against Israel. “We wanted to fight back [against the settlers] but the army did not allow us to do that. It’s like a tragedy when we see our properties being destroyed but there is nothing we can do about it.”
On Monday, an Israeli military official said its forces were urgently hunting the killers of the two Israelis who had been gunned down in Huwara on Sunday, Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19.
“We are acting together with police and other security forces to try and keep public order and prevent nationalistic crimes in the area,” said the Israeli official, adding that 10 settlers had been arrested over “revenge activity” in and around Huwara.
Huwara, which sits on a major highway connecting Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank, has become an increasingly common hot spot for settler violence. It is also just south of Nablus, where the Israeli army has been carrying out near-daily raids on Palestinian militant groups in what it says are pre-emptive strikes to prevent terror attacks against Israelis.
Israel’s West Bank settlements are widely regarded by the international community, including Britain, as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
Since the start of the year more than 60 Palestinians have been killed, as well as 13 Israelis, in some of the worst violence to blight the Holy Land in a decade.
On Monday evening, Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, condemned the settlers’ actions as a “cruel and violent rampage,” while Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said he held the Israeli government “fully responsible” for the “terrorist acts” of settlers.
Last night there were reports of renewed rioting in Huwara, while an Israeli man was said to be in critical condition after being shot near the Palestinian city of Jericho.
