ISRAEL’S Peace Now has called for West Bank settlers to be disarmed, following separate shooting incidents which left two Palestinians dead.
Yariv Oppenheimer, secretary general of the anti-settlement group, called on the police to “collect most of the weapons held by settlers and act with an iron fist against any trigger-happy citizen who kills Palestinians for no reason”.
Some 300,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank amid two and a half million Palestinians. Most adult males carry army-issued weapons.
Mr Oppenheimer made his call after a 17-year-old Palestinian boy was shot and killed yesterday by settlers in the village of Khirbet Safa near Hebron.
Settlers claim the clash occurred when a group of Jews hiking in the area were attacked by Palestinian villagers. Palestinian sources blamed the settlers for provoking a clash by descending on the village in large numbers. Israeli troops eventually arrived at the scene to restore order. Two Palestinians were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment and one was pronounced brain dead. He later died. The second person was treated for gunshot wounds to the arm.
Malachi Levinger, the head of the nearby Kiryat Arba settlement council, claimed the hikers acted to protect themselves.
“We call upon the army and the police to uphold the right of Jews to hike in their country, and to seek the guilty parties among the rioters, and not among the hikers who acted in self-defence,” he said.
Yesterday’s incident came a day after an 18-year-old Palestinian was killed by an unidentified Israeli who was stoned by Palestinians near the West Bank’s largest city, Nablus.
Police said they have film footage showing the man first firing a warning shot in the air and then shooting at the crowd.
However, the victim’s cousin, who was with him at the time, claimed that four settlers fired at them from a nearby hilltop.
Also yesterday, thousands of Hamas supporters protested in the Gaza Strip against Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank. The protests were in response to the documents leaked this week by the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera.
The station alleged the documents show that Mr Abbas, during peace talks with the previous Israeli government headed by prime minister Ehud Olmert, was ready to make far-reaching concessions .