By Ali Sawafta and Steven Scheer
TAYBEH, West Bank/JERUSALEM, Oct 18 (Reuters) – US diplomats visited a Christian Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Sunday following attacks by militant Israeli settlers on European diplomats and an American photojournalist in the previous two days.
Riley Barnes, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, Brian Burch, US ambassador to the Holy See, and a number of other diplomats visited the Latin Convent church and were expected to meet with members of the Christian community in Taybeh.
Belgian, French and Polish diplomats, along with a French mayor and Palestinian civilians, had been attacked near Taybeh on Saturday by masked Israeli settlers.
The previous day, Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was taken to hospital after being assaulted while covering a Palestinian olive harvest near another West Bank village.
The diplomats’ visit coincided with US President Donald Trump endorsing his ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for Israel’s parliamentary election on October 27.
NETANYAHU CIRCUMSPECT ON SETTLER VIOLENCE
Trump has this year expressed his opposition to settlement expansion, but his administration has put little pressure on Netanyahu’s right-wing, pro-settler government to change its policy.
UN bodies and most countries deem the settlements illegal under international law, but Israel rejects this, viewing the territory as disputed rather than occupied.
While Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and the Israeli military (IDF) both blamed “Israeli rioters” for the attack on the diplomats, Netanyahu, whose coalition is projected to lose its governing majority, has been more circumspect.
He has said the diplomats entered a “sensitive area with a history of confrontations without prior coordination with the IDF”, and that the facts of the attack on Levine are “unclear”.
France urged Israeli authorities to arrest Saturday’s attackers and to end criminal violence in the West Bank, but by Sunday there was no announcement from Israeli authorities of any arrests in either of the two latest incidents.
The West Bank is home to some 500,000 settlers and at least 3 million Palestinians.
Settler attacks on the Palestinians are surging, with at least 170 since September 27, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group. Journalists, activists and foreign observers have also been targeted.
Yet prosecutions of Israeli settlers are rare.
On Sunday, Reuters saw a group of at least 10 settlers, masked and dressed in black, hurling rocks at Palestinians and activists harvesting olives near the Palestinian West Bank town of Salfit, prompting the farmers to flee.
Israeli border police were in the area and shot tear gas towards the hills.
(Reporting by Ali Sawafta in Taybeh, Steven Scheer and Alexander Cornwell in Jerusalem and Pesha Magid in Salfit, West Bank; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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