WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime’s forces and settlers carried out 1,705 attacks across the occupied West Bank including East Al-Quds last month, a Palestinian official has said.
“The [Israeli] occupation army carried out 1,475 attacks, while settlers carried out 230 attacks,” Moayad Shaaban, who heads the official Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, said in a statement.
He explained that a majority of the attacks – 300 – took place in Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank followed by Al-Khalil with 267 attacks, and Ramallah which suffered 263 attacks.
The attacks included armed assaults against Palestinian villages, field executions, vandalism, bulldozing agricultural lands and uprooting olive trees, seizing the private property of Palestinians and installing barriers that divide Palestinian villages, according to the same source.
Shaaban said settlers have also tried to establish eight new colonial outposts since the beginning of last month, for agricultural and pastoral purposes in Tubas Governorate, Ariha, Al-Khalil, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarm and Nablus.
Occupation authorities have demolished 79 facilities including inhabited and under construction homes as well as agricultural facilities and distributed 93 demolition notices for Palestinian facilities. They also put forward 27 structural plans to expand illegal Jewish only settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Al-Khalil.
According to prisoners’ affairs groups on Tuesday, the Israeli army detained at least 20 Palestinians in fresh military raids in the occupied West Bank.
A freed female prisoner who was released under a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner swap deal was among the detainees that targeted the southern city of Al-Khalil, the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner Society said in a joint statement.
The statement identified the rearrested detainee as Israa Ghunaimat from Surif town near Al-Khalil city.
Ghunaimat was among female prisoners freed from Israeli jails under the ceasefire agreement that took hold in Gaza on Jan. 19.
The arrests came amid Israeli military escalation in the northern West Bank, where at least 65 people have been killed and thousands displaced since Jan. 21.
The new arrests brought the number of Palestinians detained by the Israeli army in the West Bank since October 2023 to over 14,500, including those who were released after being arrested, according to Palestinian figures.