News - Middle East: Attacks by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinians across the occupied  West Bank have increased since the Gaza ceasefire took effect last month, a report says.

The Guardian reported on Tuesday that dozens of new incidents have occurred in recent days across much of the occupied territory as “settlers stepped up a broader effort to intimidate and harm Palestinian communities.”

“It’s really bad at the moment. The settlers are operating with total impunity,” said Aviv Tatarsky, an Israeli activist who has monitored settler violence in the West Bank for decades.

A concerted campaign of harassment by groups of armed and aggressive Israeli settlers comes as Palestinian farmers try to harvest their olive trees before the end of the season, the report noted.  

The UN logged more than 260 attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or damage to property in the West Bank in October alone – the highest monthly count since they began monitoring in 2006.

Records kept by the Palestinian Farmers’ Union (PFU) show incidents of violence against its members up fourfold, from three or four daily before the war in Gaza.

The most recent attacks are “not random, but deliberate efforts to undermine Palestinian rural life,” the PFU said in a statement last month.

Israeli authorities recently stopped activists and volunteers from reaching the village of Burin, where they were to assist Palestinians with their olive harvest.

Israeli authorities have repeatedly blocked such efforts.

Hanna Uihlein, a UK-based volunteer, was among a group of more than 30 volunteers from Europe and the US who were held in prison for between 36 hours and five days by Israeli authorities after being detained near Nablus last month.

 All were eventually deported. 

“We were there to observe and protect … We were treated as criminals and the whole experience was dehumanizing. It was also very clear from the beginning that it was strategic – to intimidate, deter and prevent any form of solidarity with Palestinian farmers,” she said.

Palestinians and human rights campaigners say Israeli authorities do nothing to control settlers in the West Bank.

Many ministers in Israel’s ruling coalition have close ideological and organisational ties with settler gangs, and frequently offer vocal support. Bezalel Smotrich, the hawkish minister, lives in a settlement and called in September for Israel to annex “roughly 82% of the West Bank.”

There has also been a rise in violence involving the Israeli military. Palestinian health officials said on Sunday that a 19-year-old Palestinian man was killed by Israeli military fire near Nablus, the seventh person to be killed in the West Bank in the past two weeks by Israeli fire.

The total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers since October 7, 2023, in the West Bank, including East al-Quds, is now well over 1,000.

One in five of the victims is a child, including more than 200 boys and seven girls. The number also includes 20 women and at least seven people with disabilities.

Press TV