On Monday, February 28, 2022, a group of Israeli settlers stoned a number of Palestinian vehicles at the Nablus-Jenin road in the north of the occupied West Bank, damaging many of them.
Under military protection, the settlers gathered at the entrance to the Homesh settlement, vacated in 2005, and blocked the road for Palestinian vehicles.
Homesh Settlement was established in the year 1980, on lands that originally belonged to Palestinians from Silat Ad Daher, Burqa and Al Fanduqimiah villages in Nablus Governorate. The three villages lost about 1000 Dunums of the agricultural lands for the construction of this settlement in the beginning of the eighties
Before its evacuation, the Israeli settlers of Homesh were infamous for their aggressiveness and violence against Palestinians, and the settlements’ location among these Palestinian villages has always been a source of fear and despair to Palestinian residents living in the aforementioned villages.
Recently, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Tor Wencesland, said that the setters intensified attacks on Palestinian and their properties near the evacuated settlement in an attempt to revive and return to the illegal settlement.
This month has witnessed a worrying continuation of the trends I have outlined repeatedly in this Council, particularly the destabilizing deterioration of the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, he said in a statement issued last Wednesday.
The United Nations has earlier recorded 450 settler attacks in 2021,
an average of an attack a day. 118 of the attacks involved casualties. 358 settler attacks were also occurred in 2020, 84 involved casualties.
More than 600,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank make life more difficult for Palestinians living under the occupation.
Under international law, all Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are considered illegal.
