Taybeh, 17 October. A group of masked settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats and Catholic Church representatives near the town of Taybeh, east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, knocking a French mayor to the ground and smashing a window of a Belgian consular car, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry and Belgium's consul general in Jerusalem said (Anadolu, Anadolu).
The delegation included the French and Belgian consuls, a Polish representative, Bernard Baudoux, mayor of the French town of Aulnoye-Aymeries, the archbishop of Cambrai and a local priest; the diplomats had joined Palestinian farmers at the olive harvest to deter settler violence with their presence, Belgian Consul General Anick Van Calster said. "Attacking diplomats is a new escalation," she said (Anadolu, Anadolu).
Israeli army radio reported seven masked attackers and said troops and police arrived three hours later; the army called it a "serious violent incident" (Anadolu). US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington was "very disturbed" by an attack on American photojournalist Heidi Levine, who was covering the olive harvest, and that the US was asking Israel to crack down on such violence (Anadolu, CGTN).
Background: Rubio said Trump's lifting of sanctions on Israeli settlers on his first day in office did not mean support for such attacks; US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called for those who attacked Levine to be punished (Anadolu). The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called the attack near Taybeh an example of "organised settler terrorism" (Anadolu).
List of sources used
Artificial intelligence was used in preparing this material.
