JERUSALEM — Masked settlers attacked a group of European diplomats during a visit to the occupied West Bank on Saturday, Belgium’s foreign minister said, on a second straight day of high-profile assaults on Palestinians and others during the sensitive olive harvest.
At least four people have been killed and more than 100 injured since the harvest began earlier this month, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Activists say Israeli authorities do little to stop attacks that involve weapons ranging from slingshots to guns. An attack Friday seriously injured a Washington Post photographer and others.
In Saturday’s attack in the Christian village of Taybeh, settlers targeted Belgium’s consul general, French and Polish diplomats and Catholic representatives, Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said.
“A French mayor was assaulted and a Belgian vehicle damaged. Our team is safe,” Prevot said. He linked the attack to what he called Israel’s “illegal settlement policy” and pledged to push for further European Union sanctions. “Impunity for violent settlers must end,” he added.
Video shared by an activist at the scene, Amit Orfali, shows the French mayor, wearing a tricolor sash, leaning against a vehicle while sitting on the dusty ground. Other clips showed young masked men knocking insistently on a driver’s side window and asking for IDs, while other masked men carrying sticks advanced in the distance.
Orfali said the masked men “threatened to kill us.”
The attacks came less than two weeks before closely contested elections that could end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s time in office. His government, the most nationalist and far-right in Israel’s history, faces domestic criticism over security failures and international criticism over the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Some of the government’s senior officials are settlers themselves.
Israel’s military in a statement confirmed Saturday’s attack on the diplomats and called it a “severe act of violence,” but said the visit had not been co-ordinated with it and no soldiers were at the scene.
Israeli police said they had opened an investigation and vowed to work “until everyone who took part in these cases is brought to justice.” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on X condemned the “severe acts of violence by Israeli rioters,” adding that his ministry was in contact with ambassadors from the countries concerned.
But Netanyahu’s office later issued a statement warning against “premature conclusions” in the incident and noted concerns about “a co-ordinated campaign to smear Israel.”
Netanyahu’s main rival in the elections, Gadi Eisenkot, said on X that “a handful of criminals is burning up the last shreds of legitimacy left to the state of Israel.”
Eisenkot called it “Jewish terror” -- the same term the photographer for The Washington Post, Heidi Levine, used when speaking to The Associated Press on Saturday from her hospital bed.
“I’ve been covering this region for over 40 years, and I have never seen this country in such a state as it is today,” Levine said, adding that she was “shocked and insulted” that Netanyahu referred to the attack on her and others as an alleged one.
Netanyahu in the past has attributed the violence to a small number of troublemakers. But cars have been burned, trees damaged and people hurt in communities across the Palestinian territory, with some people calling this the most dangerous season yet.
The UN and much of the international community consider the settlements, many of them resembling developed suburbs, in the West Bank to be illegally occupied. Settlers have established hundreds of additional outposts without government authorization, while still enjoying protection from the Israeli military.
Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war, territories the Palestinians want for a future state. The West Bank remains under Israeli military rule.
One of the latest criticisms has come from China, whose foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Israeli President Isaac Herzog this week that Israel should “stop and revoke the act of forcibly establishing settlements in the West Bank,” a spokesperson said Friday.
By Cara Anna
Associated Press writers Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed.
