WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Four Palestinians were murdered on a single day in May by Zionist troops who colluded with settlers, according to an investigation by the Intercept.
The joint attacks were carried out on 14 May, and left four Palestinians dead including Nidal Safidi, a 30-year-old from the village of Urif, based in south of Nablus. He was shot by four bullets – one to the chest and one in the abdomen – and died of his wounds.
Mazen Shehadeh, head of the Urif village council, described to the Intercept how a large number of armed settlers, protected by the occupation troops, attacked and fired bullets towards the citizens of Urif, including at a school.
“The settlers uprooted almost 60 fig and olive trees,” he said. Residents of the village were called through the mosque minarets to urgently help put out fires ignited by settlers in the village’s agricultural lands.
“Then they attacked the school with stones and broke its solar panels … While the settlers did all of that, the soldiers covered for them by gunfire,” Shehadeh continued.

Open-Ended Hunger Strike

Furthermore, five Palestinians go on indefinite hunger strike at the Zionist regime’s jails to protest their similarly indefinite and unexplained imprisonment at the hands of the regime.
The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported the development on Thursday, citing the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Authority.
“Four of them are languishing at Rimon prison” in the north of the occupied territories, while another is being held at the regime’s prison in the Negev desert, the agency wrote.
The inmates are protesting their “administrative detention.” The Zionist regime has been applying the term to its rampant detainment of Palestinians without providing them with any reason for their arrest or informing them about the likely date of their release.
The prisoners’ body called the method “a violation of human rights, based on which captives are entitled to know about the circumstances surrounding their detention.”
Meanwhile, the Zionist regime arrested dozens of Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank who are allegedly linked to the Hamas resistance movement.
Hamas condemned the arrest of the students, who it says were paying a solidarity visit to the demolished home of a Palestinian.
The Palestinian man’s estranged wife, who said she knew nothing about the attack, and their three youngest children were living in the home before it was demolished earlier this month. The case drew attention to the Zionist regime’s policy of punitive demolitions, which the regime says are ‘needed to deter attacks’ but which human rights groups say amounts to collective punishment.
In another development, the Zionist regime’s new prime minister Naftali Bennett has approved the construction of more than 3,400 settler units in the occupied West Bank as part of the regime’s policy of expanding its illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories.
Bennett gave the green light to the project on Wednesday, which involves the construction of 3,412 apartment units in an unbuilt area of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, known as E1.
The construction plan has been widely criticized by Palestinian authorities as it cuts land access between Palestinian-inhabited territories in the West Bank and renders any future unified Palestinian state unviable.
Former Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to advance the E1 project but it was halted under pressure from the international community, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and rights groups.
Tensions have been running high over the past weeks between Zionist forces and Palestinians over the demolition of Palestinian homes and the eviction of their families in the West Bank and East Al-Quds.
The occupying regime on Wednesday demolished 11 Palestinian residential units in the Bedouin community of Al-Qabbun in the West Bank.