8 Injured as Israeli Forces Clear Illegal Settlement
Clashes between Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces in the West Bank during the night left eight people including six border guards injured, police said on Tuesday.
"Police came to help soldiers to demolish five illegal constructions near Yitzhar," a settlement in the northern West Bank, police spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence France Presse.
"After they'd finished, several dozen settlers began throwing stones, injuring six border guards," she said.
Police responded by using "riot dispersal means," and two settlers were injured during the clashes, Samri said.
Israel has moved to demolish "wildcat" settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank, which normally consist of a few makeshift dwellings set up by extremist Jewish settlers on Palestinian territory.
Army radio said existing orders to demolish the structures outside Yitzhar had been carried out.
But a spokesman for the illegal settlement, speaking on the radio, accused the army of carrying out "collective punishment" after a military vehicle in the area was vandalized by a suspected Jewish extremist.
Israeli rights group Yesh Din said the army was not doing enough to clamp down on the settlers, emboldening them by allowing them to attack the area's Palestinians.
"Israeli security forces have ignored gross violations of the law and serious acts of violence against Palestinians in the vicinity of the settlement of Yitzhar," said Yesh Din.
"It comes as no surprise that the 'monster' the security forces have created... has now spun out of control and has begun to attack the security forces themselves."
There are some 100 wildcat settler outposts erected around the West Bank without Israeli government authorization.
The international community regards all West Bank settlements as illegal, regardless of whether they were built with Israeli authorization.
In a violent confrontation in December 2012, more than 200 stone-throwing settlers drove off an attempt by security forces to dismantle structures put up at Oz Zion, wounding five border policemen. They were demolished the following day.
But the Jewish state quietly "legalized" several of the wildcat outposts in the same year, according to Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now.
The issue of settlement building has long been a key stumbling block in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Israel has pushed forward plans for thousands of new settlement homes in the West Bank during faltering negotiations that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry launched in July.
Source: Agence France Presse
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