Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in front of Israeli soldiers who watch without intervening.

At least four different incidents of settler violence against Palestinians occurred last week in different areas across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Extremist Jewish settlers set fire to al-Huda mosque in the southern West Bank town of al-Jaba on Wednesday February 25. They also sprayed racist Hebrew slogans calling for killing Arabs and Muslims on the walls.

I similar incident occurred in Hebron that same day. Settlers uprooted one hundred olive tree saplings recently planted by Palestinian farmers on land they believe to be under threat of annexation due to the proximity of Jewish-only settlements in the area.

A day later, suspected Jewish extremists set fire to a Christian seminary in East Jerusalem's Old City, leaving behind messages such as "Jesus is a son of a whore" and "Redemption of Zion" scrawled across the walls.

That same day, settlers spray-painted “Death to Arabs” and other racist graffiti on the walls of a school in Nablus. This attack is typical of so-called  “Price Tag” policy - acts of random violence against Palestinians or the Israeli security forces carried out by a group of primarily young, extremist Israeli settlers because the later two are “harming the settlement enterprise,” according to leading israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. 

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there were at least 329 reported instances of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in 2014.

Ghassan Daghlas, in charge of the Palestinian Authority’s Israeli Settlements File in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, sees a connection between the upcoming Israeli elections and the increase in settler violence against Palestinians. According to Ma’an News Agency, he accuses the Israeli government of "giving free rein to extremist settlers to carry out attacks against Palestinians in an attempt to win settler votes in the upcoming Knesset elections.”

As for Senior PLO official Saeb Erekat, "These terrorists have been incited (sic) for and protected by a government that claims exclusivity over this land and that justifies its illegal occupation and colonization based on distorted religious claims,” he said in an interview with Ma’an News Agency.