Israeli settlers vandalizing Palestinian farms, stealing olive harvest: Footage
Israeli settlers have been caught on camera vandalizing Palestinian farms in the occupied West Bank and stealing their olive harvest.
The footage, released by Israeli NGO Rabbis for Human Rights, clearly shows Israeli settlers trespassing onto Palestinian property and stealing olives from the groves belonging to Palestinians, Haaretz reported Wednesday.
The activists said they have documented four such cases in three different locations in the past week.
Palestinians say the thefts and vandalism occur mainly on Palestinian land near settlements that they can only reach by coordinating ahead of time with the Israeli military, according to the report.
The Haaretz report also said Israeli police had detained four settlers over the past week on suspicion of vandalism, but released all of them.
In this respect, the rights group highlighted the case of a settler, who routinely sabotages Palestinian olive trees and sells to Israeli forces. The settler was caught but not removed from the area, it added.
The report also quoted Ibrahim Salah, a resident of a village to the southwest of Nablus, as saying he found some 450 of trees at his grove close to the Havat Gilad settlement had been harvested of their olives.
“They don’t let us go there every day, and everything requires coordination, and when we come here we discover this damage,” Salah said. “Why are we forbidden from accessing our groves? For us, the olive trees are the main source of income, and there's nobody to deter the settlers from doing such damage.”
Most of the attacks carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property are met with impunity, with those guilty rarely facing consequences for such actions.
Other rights groups, including Yesh Din and B’Tselem, have on several occasions slammed the regime in Tel Aviv failing to protect Palestinians from settler violence or investigate attacks, particularly during olive harvest season.
More than half a million Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds. Built on occupied land, the settlements are internationally condemned as illegal.
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