The Palestinian NGOs Network has urged the United Nations to provide international protection for Palestinian civilians against attacks conducted by Israeli settlers who are backed by the regime’s army.
In a statement, the network, which includes 145 organizations, demanded that the UN take urgent measures to provide international protection for Palestinians amid escalated settler attacks, especially in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
The groups described the escalated settler violence as part of Israeli attempts to “forcibly deport” the Palestinians, noting that the attacks amount to “war crimes.”
The attacks come as part of “an open and systematic war,” and “are not individual” or separate from Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied territories, the statement said.
The Palestinian NGOs Network also urged the UN to pressure Israel to stop its practices against the Palestinians which they said amount to “war crimes”.
It also called for taking all necessary steps to support Palestinians’ right to remain on their land and to stop all Israeli measures aimed to evacuate the territory of its indigenous people.
The statement also stressed the significance of activating the popular protection and security committees and supplying them with necessary needs to confront “extremism and racism.”
The network also called for the formation of a broad international front to end the Israeli occupation and for the expansion of international campaigns of solidarity with the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights.
It also called for prosecuting the occupying regime and holding it accountable for the atrocities it has committed against the Palestinian people.
Israeli settlers routinely engage in acts of violence and vandalism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Palestinians are outraged by the sharp rise in settler attacks on their villages, which are backed by the Israeli military.
Israeli rights group B’Tselem has documented hundreds of such settler attacks this year alone.
However, Israeli authorities rarely prosecute the Israeli settler assaults on Palestinians and their property. Hence, the vast majority of the files are closed due to deliberate police failure to investigate properly.
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The settler violence includes property and mosque arson attacks, stone-throwing, uprooting of crops and olive trees, attacks on vulnerable homes, among other acts.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday strongly denounced the rising attacks by Israeli forces and settlers across the occupied territories, stressing that Palestinians have a lawful right to resist Israel’s occupation of their lands.
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on Friday warned that the Israeli military and settlers would pay the price for the increasing settler violence, after an Israeli settler ran over a 63-year-old woman near the town of Sinjil, northeast of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — territories the Palestinians want for a future state — during the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War in 1967. It later had to withdraw from Gaza.
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. All the settlements are illegal under international law. The United Nations Security Council has condemned the settlement activities in several resolutions.
