JIT, West Bank — Residents of this Palestinian village gathered Friday to mourn one of their own, just hours after Palestinian officials said dozens of masked Jewish settlers raided the town, setting homes and cars on fire and shooting dead Rashid Sadah.
West Bank village mourns resident killed in settler attack
The attack late Thursday in Jit in the northern West Bank was the latest in a string of assaults by settlers on Palestinian communities.
3 min
By Heidi Levine
and Rashid, 23, was shot by the assailants after he went to help neighbors, whose house was on fire, according to his aunt, Alia Rashid. Another man was shot and critically injured in the incident, Palestinian authorities said.
Rashid’s mother, Eman, described her son as a typical young man who liked working on computers. “He wanted to travel. He wanted to marry,” she said.
The attack on Jit, which has just several thousand residents, drew unusually strong condemnation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israel Defense Forces and other senior Israeli officials. Netanyahu, whose government has expanded Israel’s footprint in the occupied West Bank, said in a statement that he took the riot “seriously” and vowed to prosecute “any criminal act.”
The IDF also said it was investigating what it described as a “serious incident,” along with the Israeli police and the internal security service Shin Bet. “Dozens of Israeli civilians, some of them masked, entered the town of Jit and set fire to vehicles and structures in the area, hurled rocks and molotov cocktails,” an IDF statement said.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and built sprawling settlements here for Israeli citizens, seizing land and demolishing Palestinian property. The far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition have openly called for solidifying Israeli control of the West Bank, with the goal of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In security-camera footage from Jit, close to the city of Nablus, masked men are seen entering a Palestinian home, pouring liquid on furniture and setting it alight. The attack started around 8 p.m. local time on Thursday and lasted for about an hour, residents said, before the IDF arrived and dispersed the rioters.
A relative of Rashid, Ibrahim Sadah, 55, said he was hosting extended family for dinner when the settlers began marauding through the village. Outside his home, they burned two cars.
“We aren’t making problems for anyone,” Ibrahim said Friday, calling the attack “a battle.”
“We don’t have weapons, we don’t have anything. But the settlers had weapons. They were shooting us,” he said.
Rights groups say that the Israeli government and the military enable attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian civilians and that the acts of violence that are rarely investigated.
“What we saw tonight is settler violence under the auspices of the army,” Yesh Din, an Israeli organization that documents settler violence, said in a statement Thursday.
The U.N. Human Rights Office also said Friday that Rashid’s killing “was not an isolated attack.”
“This was a direct consequence of Israel’s settlement policy and the prevailing climate of impunity,” the office said in a statement.
The Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry called the assault “organized state terrorism,” and the White House said the attacks “must stop” while urging Israeli authorities “to take necessary measures to protect all residents.”
At least 114 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in roughly 1,250 settler attacks in the West Bank since Oct. 7, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Over the period, Palestinians have killed at least 17 Israelis.
Rashid’s mother said Jewish settlers routinely act “under the protection of the military” in the West Bank.
“They won’t do anything,” Eman said of the pledges to investigate her son’s death.
Berger reported from Jerusalem.
