RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli settlers attacked two Palestinian towns early on Wednesday, setting fire to property and hurling stones, after police looked to dismantle an illegal settler outpost in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military said.
Police and the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service said they had arrested eight people for assaulting security forces and damaging property.
Palestinian officials said settlers set one house and two cars ablaze in Huwara, a town near the city of Nablus that has been targeted in the past by radical settlers who want Israel to claim sovereignty over all West Bank territory.
A group of settlers also torched a property in the nearby town of Beit Furik.
The Palestinian president’s office condemned the violence, saying there had been around 30 settler attacks in the Nablus area in less than a month. Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh called on the United States to intervene.
The Israeli military said a group of settlers had confronted both its own forces and the police.
“The IDF strongly condemns all violence of any kind against IDF personnel and views such incidents with utmost severity,” the army said in its statement.
According to the United Nations, more than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live among 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territory Israel captured in 1967. Most countries deem settlements built on the captured land to be illegal. Israel disputes this and cites historical and biblical ties to the land.
There has been a surge in violence across the West Bank since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel, which triggered Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and a wider conflict on several fronts.
Some settler youth groups reject the jurisdiction of the Israeli military in areas that they see as under their control and have attacked Israeli forces, as well as Palestinians.
Some settler leaders have said violence has no place in their movement and have called for offenders to be prosecuted.
Settler groups have taken advantage of the Gaza violence to try to build new outposts in areas that the Israeli state has not yet authorised, with the army occasionally dispatched to dismantle them.
(Reporting by Ali Sawafta and Crispian Balmer; Editing by Peter Graff)
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