Palestine

A few excerpts:

That night, the settlers moved from home to home forcing families out at gun point.

Resident Aliya Mlihat immediately rang the police, who were slow to respond. When border police and three military jeeps arrived on the scene, they did nothing to stop the onslaught, even facilitating the raids on people's homes.

Mlihat recalled that "the expressions on the soldiers' faces revealed satisfaction - even joy - as if they were endorsing the settlers' actions".

In one photo taken by Mlihat, settlers can be seen lounging in chairs and grinning alongside soldiers in fatigues.

The attack was led by sanctioned Israeli settler Zohar Sabah, who had set up the new outpost. According to Mlihat, Sabah stormed the area armed with an M16 rifle, shouting at residents to "flee to Jordan".

Israeli rights group Stop the Wall reported that settlers pitched a tent in the middle of the village, hooking it up to running water from a nearby outpost. They then proceeded to expand the outpost, forcing the 125 residents to flee to the industrial zone of Beitunia, where they do not have access to water or electricity.

"It involves just a couple of people setting up an outpost, herding their own flocks on the community's traditional grazing land, taking over access to water resources, stealing sheep, intimidating the community and preventing them from having access to all the natural resources around them.

"And then we'll see this escalation of violent attacks, often at night. This is what we're seeing now, just copy-paste, replicated all across the area east of Ramallah."

"It means that the two-state solution that the international community purports to support will no longer be viable, or is not viable if there's no Palestinian presence in large parts of the West Bank."

Low emphasised that despite frequent visits by diplomats to imperilled Palestinian villages in the West Bank, the international community is doing little to prevent their displacement.