ISRAEL – The Israeli far right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has urged the decimation of Palestinian villages as revenge near the area where an Israeli settler was attacked on Wednesday, and later confirmed dead on Thursday.
Israeli public broadcaster KAN said an Israeli settler died from serious injuries she sustained in the Wednesday evening attack in the northern occupied West Bank.
Mentioning sites in the war-devastated Gaza Strip on X, Smotrich said, “Just as we flattened Rafah, Khan Younis and Gaza, we must flatten the nests of terror in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name of the West Bank.
“(The Palestinian villages) Bruqin and Kafr al-Dik should look like Shejaiya (neighborhood in Gaza City) and Tel al-Sultan (neighborhood in Rafah),” he added.
On Wednesday evening, Israel’s emergency medical service Magen David Adom reported that two Israelis were seriously wounded in a shooting attack on a vehicle on Route 446 between the Palestinian town of Bruqin and the illegal Israeli settlement of Peduel.
On the attack, Palestinian group Hamas said: “The heroic shooting operation targeting a settlers’ vehicle near the town of Bruqin, west of Salfit, comes in response to the escalating crimes and ongoing aggression by the occupation against our people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, as well as against our prisoners and holy sites.”
Israeli Settler Attacks on Palestinians in Gaza
At least 962 Palestinians have been killed and more than 7,000 injured in attacks by the Israeli army and illegal settlers in the West Bank since the start of the onslaught in the Gaza Strip in October 2023, according to Palestinian figures.