The Biden administration equated Palestinian terror attacks with settler violence in a month when four Israelis have been gunned down in such attacks, three of them this week.
“The US remains deeply concerned by violence in the West Bank and Israel and we express our condolences to those killed,” US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas Greenfield told the United Nations Security Council on Monday, as it held its monthly meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
She spoke on a day when two Palestinian terrorists sprayed an Israeli civil vehicle with over 20 bullets, killing a preschool teacher in front of her daughter, and seriously wounding the driver.
Two days earlier a Palestinian terrorist fatally shot two Israelis at close blank range as they waited for their car to be washed in the Palestinian town of Huwara. On August 5th, a Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli police officer.
UN Ambassador condemns terror attacks
Thomas-Greenfield said, “We [the US] strongly condemn Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis, including this morning’s shooting attack near Hebron,” she said as she listed all the incidents.
Israeli security forces secure the scene of a shooting attack in Huwara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, August 19, 2023. (credit: FLASH90)She then referenced an incident outside the village of Burka, that led to the shooting death on August 4, of one of its residents Qusai Jamal Ma’atan, 19, by a settler who suffered from a fractured skull after he was hit in the head with a rock. But the details of the incident, unlike other examples of settler violence, remain murky. The Israelis involved in the incident have explained that a shepherd was attacked while herding his sheep, called on his friends for help, and that the shooting was in self-defense. Palestinians say they were defending their village from a violent infiltration by settlers.
The US immediately called the incident a terror attack, a claim which Thomas-Greenfield repeated on Monday.
“We strongly condemn the terror attacks by settlers in Burka on August 4th that killed a 19-year-old Palestinian,” she said.
Both Israelis and Palestinians must take “immediate steps to descale and restore calm,” Thomas-Greenfield said. She encouraged Israeli and Palestinian security forces to increase their cooperation.
“We urge all parties to take proactive measures to counter all forms of violence and incitement to violence and refrain from actions that inflame tensions, including settlement activity, evictions [of Palestinians, [and] the demolition of Palestinian homes,” she said. Thomas-Greenfield also called on the Palestinian Authority to halt its monthly stipends to terrorists that have killed Israelis and or their family members.
British envoy to the UN in New York James Kariuki said that the United Kingdom was “extremely alarmed by the growth of settler violence” in the West Bank, with the “UN agencies have recorded 591 settler-related incidents resulting in Palestinian casualties, property damage or both.”
“We urge all parties to take proactive measures to counter all forms of violence and incitement to violence and refrain from actions that inflame tensions, including settlement activity, evictions [of Palestinians, [and] the demolition of Palestinian homes,”
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas Greenfield
He included in this the “murder” of Ma’atan, an act that the UK condemns.
Kariuki also condemned the “abhorrent terrorist attacks” against Israelis in August as he called on the “Palestinian Authority to “tackle terrorism and incitement.” He did not draw the same equivalency between Palestinian terror and settler, as the US had done.
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