In the occupied southern West Bank city of al-Khalil, a Palestinian boy was struck by the car of an Israeli settler, causing multiple bruises and fractures.
The four-year-old victim, identified as Joud al-Fakhori, was reportedly struck on Friday night in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of al-Khalil, according to local sources cited by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.
According to the sources, the settler ran over Joud as he was crossing a local street and then escaped the scene.
The child was taken by the paramedics of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to Princess Alia Governmental Hospital for treatment, according to a statement from the organization.
According to sources, the child suffered from bruises and a fractured leg. The young person’s condition was described as stable.
In various areas of the occupied West Bank, there have been repeated “hit and run” incidents involving settlers targeting Palestinians; the majority of these incidents have not received much attention from Israeli authorities.
Even fatalities have occurred as a result of some such incidents.
A young Palestinian was killed earlier on Friday by Israeli settlers in a village close to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian Health Ministry named the deceased teen as Qosai Jammal Mi’tan, 19, who was shot and killed.
In the meantime, the UN on Friday expressed concern about a sharp increase in Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians, their property, and Muslim holy sites, noting that there have been nearly 600 cases of such vandalism so far this year.
In a statement, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) of the United Nations reported that in the first half of the current year, 591 settler-related incidents in the occupied territory had either caused casualties, property damage, or both.
According to spokesman Jens Laerke, “That’s an average of 99 incidents every month, and a 39-percent increase compared with the monthly average of the whole of 2022, which is 71.”
And that follows a year in 2022 “when the number of such incidents was already the highest since we began recording them in 2006,” he said.
Miloon Kothari, a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry, said in June of last year that the commission is “very disturbed that violent settler activity has considerably increased in the last months and it’s a dot becoming a strategy for ensuring Israeli annexation.”
He continued, “We would like to see an end to the Israeli occupation because as long as the occupation exists, the United Nations will need to continue conducting thorough investigations into the situation.”
