JERUSALEM, Feb. 23 — Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque and sprayed hate graffiti on its walls in the occupied West Bank overnight, Israeli and Palestinian sources said on Monday.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the fire broke out at the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Mosque near the town of Tell, adding that troops were dispatched and the incident is under review.
Eyewitnesses told the Palestinian news agency Wafa that settlers poured flammable material at the mosque entrance and wrote racist slogans hostile to Arabs and Muslims on its walls.
Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported that the words “revenge” and “price tag” — a term associated with Israeli nationalist hate crimes — were spray-painted on the walls. Israeli police data show a significant rise in settler attacks in the West Bank in recent months. In the first two weeks of January, a total of 54 investigations over nationalistic attacks were opened, a 23 percent year-on-year increase, according to a report by Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper.
The incident comes days after the United Nations Human Rights Office published a report saying there were grounds to suspect that Israel was committing ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israeli police and security agency Shin Bet said they had arrested four Israeli teen boys suspected of planning an attack against soldiers in the northern city of Karmiel.
The suspects “conspired to carry out an attack targeting soldiers in Karmiel, and that some of them had trained and received guidance” in preparation for the alleged assault, they said in a joint statement.
The arrests followed over two years of heightened security tensions linked to Israel’s military operations in Gaza, during which Israeli authorities have reported several suspected militant plots inside the country.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast War. Most of the international community considers Israeli settlements in the occupied territories illegal under international law. (Namibia Daily News/Xinhua)
