On Wednesday, a girl’s school in the Nablus district village of As-Sawiya was attached and torched by a group of Israeli settlers. According to the headmistress, Maysoon Sawalha, the settlers broke the lock of the main door as well as that of the storehouse, and set fire to the school’s storehouse. “The fire did not spread to the rest of school because the water main is located in the storehouse,” she said, adding that otherwise the whole school would have been set on fire.
Settlers had also written racist slogans on the school’s walls, including ‘regards from the hill tops’. This is a reference to the Israeli settlements, most of which are built on top of hills in the West Bank overlooking Palestinian populated areas. Nearly every peak and hill in the West Bank has been taken over by Israeli settlements, constructed in violation of international law on stolen Palestinian land.
Headmistress Maysoon Sawalha claimed that this is not the first attack on the school.She told reporters, “Many attacks were carried out previously, the last of which was last year, when settlers attacked one of the classrooms and fired rounds of ammunition and gas canisters’.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that Israel’s Civil Administration is investigating the incident and that the body was now directly in touch with Palestinian Authority officials to ‘keep things quiet’ in the area.
Sawalha called on international organizations to work on stopping such attacks, which she says, ‘put the life of the girls on risk causing them to suffer psychologically and panic out of such attacks.’
