Israeli killings in West Bank go unpunished, says rights group

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, has found that Israeli settlers responsible for the deaths of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank frequently go unpunished, according to the Middle East Eye and agencies on November 25th.

Over 1000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 2023, with the group accusing Israeli authorities of enforcing an “increasingly permissive and reckless open-fire policy.”

Reportedly, 217 of the dead were minors. Meanwhile, two Palestinian minors were shot dead by Israeli forces in Beit Amr, north of Hebron, on November 13th.

According to the group, there have been 21 instances of Palestinians being killed by settlers since October 2023, yet “not a single perpetrator has been convicted.”

Yuli Novak, B’Tselem’s executive director, said, “We are witnessing the total abandonment of Palestinian lives.”

She added, “The situation in the West Bank is deteriorating by the day and will only worsen, because there is no internal or external mechanism to restrain Israel or stop its ongoing policy of ethnic cleansing.”

According to B’Tselem “armed settlers attack Palestinians on a daily basis, burning homes, farmland and crops, looting property and killing residents.”

Despite many of the attacks being well-documented through video footage, the group says that “Israeli law-enforcement authorities rarely open investigations.”

Israeli authorities have been accused of failing to protect Palestinians from settler attacks, with some government officials enabling the violence, such as through the distribution of illegal weapons licenses to certain settlers by Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s department, the National Security Ministry. Ben-Gvir also leads the Jewish Power party.

Although violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and Occupied Jerusalem has escalated since the October 7th, 2023,  Hamas-led attack on Israel, more than 135 Palestinians were killed by Israeli violence in the occupied territories in the months prior to the attacks.

It was reported on November 5th, that the Palestinian Authority’s Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission had found that Israeli forces and settlers conducted 2,350 attacks (between the two of them) against Palestinians in the West Bank in October; Israeli forces were responsible for 1,584 of the attacks.

Over 700,000 Israelis live in roughly 160 settlements across the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem, despite expanded settlements being illegal under international law.

In 2022, Israeli authorities confiscated over 113,000 dunams (113 square kilometres) of land in the occupied territories in a bid to expand Jewish-only settlements. This has led to the destruction of food sources, like olive trees, which many Palestinians rely on for both food and income.

Middle East Eye and agencies, Maghrebi.org