Hawzah News Agency (Occupied Territories) - Hebrew graffiti were found Wednesday sprayed on the walls of a mosque in the northern West Bank village of Krayot, near the Israeli settlement of Shiloh, in an attack that also saw the tires of seven vehicles slashed.
Slogans included the phrases, “We will take our fate into our hands” and “Jews are not silent.”
A Star of David was also sprayed on one of the vehicles in the Palestinian village.
Security cameras recorded three suspects entering and leaving the village during the night.
In a statement, the left-wing Rabbis for Human Rights group denounced “the low rate of suspects’ capture, prosecution, and even more so, severe punishment for those who commit such hate crimes.”
“The offenders are groups and individuals, the failure is the system,” the rights group said.
In two other incidents, settlers reportedly attacked a village in the central West Bank on Wednesday and a Palestinian farmer discovered some of his olive trees had been vandalized.
Residents of the village of Urif reported to the Yesh Din rights group that at around 9:30 a.m. a group of Israelis from the settlement of Yitzhar entered their village and began throwing stones at a school on the eastern side of Urif.
“From there they continued into the village and threw stones at houses in the village,” a Yesh Din spokesman told “The windows of three homes were smashed and a vehicle was also damaged. The residents were not in their homes at the time, so no injuries were suffered.”
Residents told Yesh Din that IDF troops witnessed the incident but did not intervene other than to use riot dispersal means to distance the Palestinians who began to congregate at the site.
Two children were hit by rubber bullets and another three suffered from tear gas inhalation according to the Palestinians, the spokesman said.
Also Wednesday a local farmer from the Palestinian village of Bruqin, in the northern West Bank, told that settlers had uprooted some 40 of his olive trees.
Jamal Othman Salameh said the damage was probably done a few days ago and speculated that the culprits were from the nearby Israeli settlement outpost of Bruchin.
Salameh told that Bruchin settlers are trying to intimidate local farmers into leaving their land in order to expand the settlement. According to Salamah, in the last two years settlers have damaged more than 250 olive trees in the area.
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