Israel: ministers support settler violence against Palestinians

Ministers of the far-right ruling coalition in Israel frankly supported settler terrorism against the Palestinians in West Bank villages, Israeli media reported on Sunday. The disclosure came after hundreds of extremist Jewish settlers set fire to cars, homes, farms and other properties in several Palestinian villages across the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli army, Shin Bet security agency and the police issued a joint statement on Saturday evening condemning the settler attacks and branding them “nationalist terrorism in the full sense of the term.”

However, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the coalition’s far-right Religious Zionism party, slammed the statement and called for a crackdown on Palestinians.

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“The attempt to create an equivalency between murderous Arab terror and [Israeli] civilian counter-actions, however serious they may be, is morally wrong and dangerous on a practical level,” the far-right extremist wrote on Twitter. “The IDF and security forces must act with much greater firmness. We can’t accept a situation in which settlers feel like sitting ducks on the roads and around settlements.”

According to Energy Minister Israel Katz, “There can be no comparisons: terrorism is the terror that Palestinians are perpetrating against Jews, soldiers and innocents.”

In a related incident, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered police to investigate the “collective punishment” at the West Bank settlement of Ateret, which settlers claimed had had its gate closed by the army. It came out later, though, that the settlers who attacked the Palestinian village of Umm Safa closed the gate themselves so that soldiers could not get in and trace the cars used in the attack.

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