A rampage by Israeli settlers after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis in the occupied West Bank has exacerbated fears that violence in the region could spiral out of control.
West Bank officials said one Palestinian was shot dead and more than 100 others were wounded during violence on Sunday night when mobs of settlers torched buildings and cars in several villages in the area.
The clashes erupted after Palestinian gunmen shot dead two Jewish settlers in Huwara, a Palestinian town south of Nablus, where Israeli troops killed 11 Palestinians and wounded 100 others last week in the biggest attack in the West Bank since 2005.
Another Israeli was killed in a separate shooting on a street in the West Bank on Friday, an Israeli official said on Friday evening.
Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors settler activity in the West Bank, which makes up most of the Palestinian territory but has been under Israeli control since 1967, said the 17 hours of violence were unprecedented.
He estimated around 400 settlers, residents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank considered illegal by the international community, took part in Sunday’s attack, and said around 30 houses and countless cars had been set on fire. Other houses had broken windows and doors, while some properties were also looted, he said.
“They are monsters,” he said. “It was very difficult for us yesterday.”
The attack drew criticism from opposition Israeli politicians and commentators, with one politician calling the violence a “pogrom”, and Israeli commentators comparing it. Kristallnacht.
The explosion of violence came just two months after Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the head of what is considered the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, with ultranationalist settlers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, in security posts.
Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the center-left Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, said the empowerment of prominent politicians from the settler movement had emboldened those who took part in Sunday’s rampage.
“The government has to decide what it is,” he wrote. “Has it decided to impose law and order on Arabs and Jews? Or is it a fig leaf for Hilltop Youth [an extremist group of settlers]who do as they wish in [Palestinian] territory?”
Israeli settlers confront Palestinians in Nablus © Alaa Badarneh/EPA/Shutterstock
After the killing of the two settlers, Netanyahu issued a statement urging the settlers not to indulge in vigilantism. “I ask, even if the blood has boiled, do not take the law into one hand,” he said.
However, Smotrich, who has been given power in the West Bank, demanded that Israel respond “mercilessly, with tanks and helicopters”, while his Twitter account liked a tweet calling for Huwara to be “removed”. He later issued a statement saying that the settlers should not take the law into their own hands.
Other members of the government went even further. Zvika Fogel, a member of Ben-Gvir’s far-right Jewish Power party who heads the parliament’s national security committee, accused Netanyahu of doing too little to fight terrorism, and giving support to settlers.
“How to do it [restore security]? We stopped using the word ‘proportionality’. We stop by arguing against collective punishment [just] because it does not fly with all sorts of judgments. We took off the gloves,” he said, in an interview with Galey Israel Radio on Monday.
“Huwara closed and burned – that’s what I want to see. That’s the only way to get prevention.
The head of the Labor Party, Merav Michaeli, said the party would ask the attorney general to investigate Fogel for interference.
“What happened yesterday was not just a pogrom by armed militias, whose representatives sit in the current government, some of them are silent and some of them allow others. [politicians] saying that this is a necessary preventive measure,” he said.
Sunday’s outburst of violence came amid an ongoing escalation in which Israeli forces have killed more than 60 Palestinians, and Palestinians have killed 12 Israelis and one Ukrainian this year.
To restore order, the Israeli military sent additional battalions numbering hundreds of soldiers to the West Bank on Sunday and Monday. However, some analysts accused of acting too slowly, and said that more should have been done to prevent the attack of settlers there.
“This is a failure,” Yoav Limor, a columnist at Israel Hayom wrote on Monday. “And this incident has the potential to be more explosive than any other incident in this sector last year.”