Masked Israeli terrorists, commonly referred to as settlers, attacked a convoy of European diplomats in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, near Ramallah, on Saturday afternoon. The diplomats had come to join the olive harvest, which has been under heavy assault by Israeli terrorists since it began. Israeli Army Radio, citing eyewitnesses, reported that seven masked men on quad bikes surrounded the vehicles carrying diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland, demanded identification, threw stones and smashed the window of a Belgian consulate car. Taybeh's mayor, Suleiman Khourieh, told Al Jazeera the French consul was in the delegation. "We updated the army in real time, but they neither arrived nor responded," one witness wrote.
Belgium's foreign minister, Maxime Prévot, condemned the attack "in the strongest terms" and said he will press the EU for sanctions on those responsible. He said a French mayor travelling with the delegation was assaulted, a Belgian vehicle was damaged and his staff are safe. Israel Police said the Binyamin station opened an assault investigation after footage of the attack circulated online, and that the Foreign Ministry had been told to locate the victims. France and Poland have not commented.
Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, condemned the attack and in the same breath blamed the people attacked, complaining that the visit "was not coordinated with the IDF in advance". The army said the same. It called the attack a "severe act of violence" by "Israeli rioters", said no soldiers were at the scene, and said that when a civilian travelling with the convoy phoned the regional brigade as it was happening, he had used a line "designated to receive reports from security personnel only, and not from civilians". That is the whole of the Israeli government's position: diplomats attacked on a public road in occupied territory should have asked the army first, and the army does not take calls from people being attacked. The same army guards the settlements these men ride out of, escorts them into Palestinian villages, fires tear gas at the harvesters they attack, and has prosecuted almost none of them. It does not fail to stop this. It makes it possible.
The same afternoon, in Deir Jarir, Israeli terrorists fired live rounds at harvesters and activists and drove them off their land. In Kafr Malik they stabbed about 20 sheep to death on a Palestinian farm. In Masafer Yatta armed men on quad bikes broke into a livestock shed and took the animals. The attack on the diplomats came a day after Israeli terrorists beat the Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine in Abu Falah, a few kilometres away, and amid a wave of assaults by Israeli terrorists on villages across the West Bank during this year's harvest.
This news is developing, more updates will follow.
