A group of fundamentalist Israeli settlers broke into a mosque, on Sunday at night, in Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, and set it ablaze. The settlers burnt twelve copies of the Holy Quran before setting the mosque’s carpets and grounds ablaze.
Local residents noticed the assailants and clashed with them before the Israeli army arrived at the scene and evacuated the setters; no arrests were reported.
The mosque was badly burnt and the settlers also wrote graffiti on its inner walls.
The incident is the latest in a series of attacks carried out by the settlers against mosques in the occupied West Bank.
Earlier this year, in May, a group of fundamentalist settlers torched the main mosque of the al-Lubban al-Sharqiyya village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
In January, the Israeli police detained sixteen yeshiva students and three adult settlers from the illegal West Bank settlement of Yitzhar on suspicion of involvement in torching a mosque in Yasuf Palestinian village, near the central West Bank city of Salfit; the mosque was burnt in December 2009.
On Thursday, September 30th, extremists settlers called for the demolition of a mosque in the West Bank village of Burin, near Nablus.
They wrote slogans on the walls of the mosque, demanding that the Israeli army level it.
