WEST BANK (Dispatches) – As Zionist settler attacks increase in the occupied West Bank, 145 Palestinian NGOs have come together to urge the United Nations to protect Palestinians and stop the occupying regime’s military providing settlers with impunity.
In a statement published by London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, the Palestinian groups described the attacks as attempts at “forced transference” that are equivalent to “war crimes”.
For days, settlers have been attacking Palestinian homes in the northern West Bank and organizing rallies calling for Zionists to return to an illegal settlement that was built on the land of two Palestinian towns and evacuated in 2005.
The Palestinian NGOs Network umbrella group described these developments as “a racist attack of the settlers within an open and systematic war, and it is not individual or discrete operations separated from a continuous context of attacks and ethnic cleansing, which also includes the city of Al-Quds and its surroundings, the holy sites and the rest of the Palestinian lands”.
The UN is obligated to take urgent measures to provide international protection to the Palestinians, the NGOs said, adding that all measures must be taken to stop Palestinians from being forced from their homes.
Zionist settlers routinely engage in acts of violence and vandalism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Palestinians are outraged by the sharp rise in settler attacks on their villages, which are backed by the occupying regime’s military.
Israeli rights group B’Tselem has documented hundreds of such settler attacks this year alone.
However, regime authorities rarely prosecute settler assaults on Palestinians and their property. Hence, the vast majority of the files are closed due to deliberate police failure to investigate properly.
Settler violence includes property and mosque arson attacks, stone-throwing, uprooting of crops and olive trees, attacks on vulnerable homes, among other acts.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday strongly denounced the rising attacks by Zionist troops and settlers across the occupied territories, stressing that Palestinians have a lawful right to resist the regime’s occupation of their lands.
More than 600,000 Zionists live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. All the settlements are illegal under international law. The United Nations Security Council has condemned the settlement activities in several resolutions.