Protected by Israeli forces, dozens of armed settlers have raided a village north of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, shooting at Palestinians and setting their houses and vehicles on fire.
The raid was carried out in Umm Safa village on Saturday, the official Palestinian WAFA News Agency reported.
Armed with rifles, Israeli settlers opened indiscriminate fire “at everything they came across,” the report said, damaging an ambulance and injuring a paramedic, who was moving a patient in urgent condition to a hospital.
Mohammad Radii, a Palestinian TV cameraman, told WAFA that gunshots were fired at him and his colleague as they were covering the terrorist attack by nearly 70 fanatic Israeli settlers on the village. Radii added that one gunshot directly hit and damaged their camera.
“We arrived in Umm Safa. There were dozens of settlers. They fired at the village. The moment (one of) the settlers saw us filming, he shot in our direction. Two bullets went into the camera, then the camera blew up from the shooting. Thank god we are safe,” he told Reuters.
“What happened today has been going on since Thursday. Settlers tried to set up a settlement on village land and (Palestinian) families have been stopping them for two days. … It looks like the settlers didn’t like it, so they attacked us this morning from many sides of the village,” a Palestinian villager was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The attack came after a day earlier, dozens of Palestinians were injured by settlers who went on a violent rampage across the West Bank under strict protection of Israeli forces.
