West Bank & Jerusalem
Settlers burn Palestinian homes across the West Bank in one week
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Israeli settlers burned homes and property in at least three Palestinian communities of the occupied West Bank this week, in attacks that wounded children and drew condemnation from Israel's own press.
The worst came Thursday in Tuba, in the Masafer Yatta cluster south of Hebron, where settlers torched houses and assaulted residents. Six Palestinians were wounded, four of them children, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
Days earlier, settlers set fire to vehicles and property overnight in Talfit and Jalud, villages near Nablus — attacks Haaretz's West Bank coverage described as having become a daily event across the territory.
In Umm al-Khair, the village where settler Yinon Levi shot dead the teacher Awdah Hadalin, settlers planted caravans for a new outpost beside the school Hadalin was filming when he was killed. Prosecutors this week charged Levi only with reckless killing, a count carrying at most twelve years, after he walked free from detention within a day.
Six Palestinians wounded in Tuba, four of them children
The toll of Thursday's arson attack, as Haaretz reported it
The impunity is structural, not incidental. Haaretz's own editorial board wrote Friday that the clear majority of files opened over nationalist crimes against Palestinians close without indictment, and that no Palestinian suspected of killing an Israeli could imagine investigation on such terms.
The army's role runs beyond absence. Israeli military correspondents reported this month that the army has refrained from clearing thirteen outposts slated for evacuation, while soldiers now guard the herding outposts from which many attacks begin.
The week closes with the pattern intact: new caravans on the hill above Umm al-Khair, ash in Tuba and Jalud, and no attacker in a cell.
