At dawn on Wednesday, a group of illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers infiltrated the town of Atara, north of Ramallah, and set fire to two civilian vehicles while defacing the area with racist graffiti.
Media sources said the attackers came from one of the colonies built on confiscated Palestinian land near the town.
The vehicles, belonging to Mohammad Ayoub Abu Arjila and his wife, were completely destroyed in the arson attack.
Residents awoke to thick smoke and flames and rushed to extinguish the fire before it could spread to nearby homes.
The colonizers fled toward the illegal colony north of Atara immediately after the attack.
This assault is part of a growing wave of settler violence targeting Palestinian civilians and their property across the West Bank, routinely carried out under the protection of Israeli occupation forces.
It is worth mentioning that the Wall & Colonization Resistance Commission has documented, Tuesday, 259 separate assaults against Palestinian olive harvesters since the beginning of this year’s harvest season in early October.
Earlier Wednesday, Israeli occupation forces carried out a series of incursions and abductions across multiple towns and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, targeting areas in and around Nablus, Tulkarem, Qalqilia, and Jenin.
On Tuesday, Israeli occupation forces escalated their military offensive in Jenin, detonating a home and ordering residents to evacuate homes near the Jenin refugee camp and expanding daily invasions across surrounding towns and villages.
Earlier Tuesday, Israeli forces assassinated three Palestinians during a combined ground and air assault in the area between the village of Kafr Qud and Wadi Hassan, west of Jenin.
On Sunday evening, the Palestinian Health Ministry announced that Israeli forces killed the young man, Mohammad Bassam Tayaha Sha’our, 20, at the Meitar military roadblock near Ath-Thaheriyya town, south of Hebron in the southern part of the occupied West Bank.
Since the beginning of the year, Israeli forces and colonizers have killed 226 Palestinian citizens in the occupied West Bank, including 40 children and 6 women.
Occupation forces have killed 78 Palestinians in Jenin, 40 in Nablus, 29 in Tubas, 19 in Hebron, 17 in Tulkarem, 17 in Ramallah, 9 in Bethlehem, 7 in Jerusalem, 6 in Qalqilia, 3 in Salfit, and 1 in Jericho, according to the Shireen Observatory.
All of Israel’s colonies in the occupied West Bank, including those in and around occupied East Jerusalem, are illegal under International Law, the Fourth Geneva Convention in addition to various United Nations and Security Council resolutions. They also constitute war crimes under International Law.
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and acts of terror against civilian populations.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.
Articles 53 and 147, prohibit the destruction of civilian property and classify pillage as a war crime.
