(Al Mughayyir) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced “a heinous crime” after the discovery on Saturday of the body of a young Israeli shepherd in the occupied West Bank, where the tragedy triggered an outbreak of violence against the Palestinians.
Attacks targeting Palestinian villages north of Ramallah since the disappearance of the teenager on Friday worsened and spread to Hebron (south) and Nablus (center) on Saturday after the announcement of his death at midday.
Around ten villages were besieged by the army and attacked by hundreds of settlers, leaving several injured, including one shot in the head, according to the Palestinian authorities and media.
“Dozens of settlers are attacking the village and burning everything they can get their hands on,” the mayor of al-Mughayyir, Amir Abou Alia, told AFP.
Plumes of smoke from burned houses, fields, buildings and agricultural machinery rose above the hills and valleys, AFP correspondents noted.
Call for calm
It was near al-Mughayyir that Benjamin Achimeir, 14, disappeared Friday morning while he was grazing his sheep, which returned without him to his farm in Malachei HaShalom.
A vast operation was immediately launched by the army, and hundreds of civilians, including many settlers, deployed to try to find him.
The boy’s body was located Saturday midday not far away. “Benjamin Achimeir was assassinated in a terrorist attack,” the army, police and domestic intelligence service Shin Beth said in a statement.
PHOTO JAAFAR ASHTIYEH, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Israeli soldiers set up a checkpoint during the search.
Israeli security forces are engaged “in the intensive pursuit of the despicable assassins and all those who collaborated with them,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu, denouncing “a heinous crime.”
The head of government also appealed for calm by calling on “all Israeli citizens to allow the security forces to do their work without hindrance”, and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, warned against any “act of revenge.”
The leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, for his part denounced “the settler violence” described as a “dangerous violation of the law”.
In Ramallah, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammed Mustafa, warned that these attacks would not “discourage[aient] not our people to remain on their lands and to frustrate the displacement and expulsion efforts” of the Palestinians from the territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
Smoking carcasses
PHOTO NASSER NASSER, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Al-Muhayyir bore the scars of the violence on Saturday.
The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry and the Palestinian Red Crescent have recorded at least one death and dozens of injuries, including many from gunshots, since Friday.
The Israeli army, for its part, reported “dozens of Israelis and Palestinians injured”.
Al-Muhayyir bore the scars of the violence on Saturday. Around houses or sheds with walls blackened by flames, the charred carcasses of cars, vans or agricultural machinery are still smoking, noted an AFP photographer.
Some dazed residents explored the remains of their house, of which only the skeleton of concrete blocks and the gaping windows overlooking the plain remained.
On the side of the roads, dozens of cars burned and roadblocks set up by the army to search vehicles.
According to the mayor of Duma, near Nablus, the West Bank “has been experiencing a real state of war since yesterday”. In his commune alone, 15 houses and 10 livestock farms were burned, he assured AFP.
These clashes occur in a context of increased confrontation in the West Bank since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, triggered on October 7 by the bloody attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Israeli territory.
In the West Bank, at least 462 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers since the start of the war, according to the Palestinian Authority.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, urged Friday “the UN to authorize the deployment of a protective presence” in the territories.