Israeli settlers attack Palestinian home near Nablus

Israeli settlers attack Palestinian home near Nablus

Ma’an – January 3, 2015

NABLUS – Israeli settlers on Saturday attacked a Palestinian home in the village of Beit Furik near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian Authority official said.
Ghassan Daghlas, a PA official who monitors settlement activities in the northern West Bank, told Ma’an that settlers threw stones at the home of Nihad Hanani before leaving behind a Molotov cocktail and a letter.
Daghlas said that the settlers — believed to be from the nearby illegal settlement of Itamar — were chased by locals as they fled the scene after attacking the home. The attack is the most recent to be carried out by settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The Nablus area where Beit Furik is located is site to several settlements who have gained a reputation for being home to extremists who regularly carry out attacks on Palestinians and their property, also known as “price tag attacks.”
Palestinian residents in the area have often orchestrated nightly patrols of locals to protect their villages from such attacks, as Palestinian security forces have no jurisdiction over Israeli settlers and Israeli forces rarely intervene in such attacks on behalf of Palestinians.
Last week in the Ramallah area, suspected Israeli settlers threw tear-gas bombs into the home of a Palestinian family and spray-painted the phrases “revenge” and “hello from the detainees of Zion” in Hebrew on the side of the home.
No injuries were reported in the attack, which appeared to be a revenge attack for the arrest of Jewish extremists who carried out a deadly attack on a Palestinian family in the Nablus-area village of Duma last summer.
The US State Department’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism included price tag attacks for the first time, citing UN figures of some “399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage” that year.
Such attacks were “largely unprosecuted,” it said.