Top church leaders and diplomats have called on Israeli settlers to be held accountable during a visit to the predominantly Christian town of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank, after settlers intensified attacks on the area in recent weeks.
Representatives from more than 20 countries including the United Kingdom, Russia, China, Japan, Jordan, and the European Union, were among the delegates who visited the village in the West Bank on Monday.
Speaking in Taybeh, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III and Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa denounced an incident last week when settlers set fires near the community’s church.
They said that Israeli authorities failed to respond to emergency calls for help from the Palestinian community.
In a separate statement, the patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem demanded an investigation into the incident and called for the settlers to be held accountable by the Israeli authorities, “who facilitate and enable their presence around Taybeh”.
The church leaders also said that settlers had brought their cattle to graze on Palestinian lands in the area, set fire to several homes last month, and put up a sign reading “there is no future for you here”.
Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Doha, said church leaders have been calling this a “systemic and targeted attack” against Christians.
“About 50,000 of them live in the occupied West Bank, a small but very proud minority,” Ibrahim said. “They also consider themselves under attack, not just because they’re Christians but because they’re Palestinians.”
The church has been trying for years to “enhance the steadfastness of the Christian community in Palestine”, Ibrahim said.
“We’ve been seeing how Israeli settlers have been pushing them out of their lands, out of their homes.”
Settlers, who are often armed, are backed by Israeli army soldiers and regularly carry out attacks against Palestinians, their lands, and property. Several rights groups have documented repeated instances where Israeli settlers in the West Bank ransack Palestinian neighbourhoods and towns, burning homes and vehicles.
Assaults have grown in scale and intensity since Israel’s brutal war on Gaza began in October 2023. These assaults also include large-scale incursions by Israeli forces into Palestinian towns and cities across the West Bank that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and displaced tens of thousands.
Pizzaballa, the top Catholic cleric in Jerusalem, said he believed the West Bank was becoming a lawless area.
“The only law [in the West Bank] is that of power, of those who have the force, not the law. We must work for the law to return to this part of the country, so anyone can appeal to the law to enforce their rights,” Pizzaballa told reporters.
He and Theophilos prayed together at the Church of St George, whose religious site dates back centuries, adjacent to the area where settlers ignited the fires.
The visit comes as Palestinians report a new surge of settler violence.
On Monday, Israeli settlers and soldiers launched several more attacks across the West Bank, including in Bethlehem, where settlers uprooted hundreds of olive trees in al-Maniya village, southeast of the city, and Israeli authorities demolished a four-storey residential building.
The head of the al-Maniya village council, Zayed Kawazba, told Wafa news agency that a group of settlers stormed al-Qarn in the centre of al-Maniya, set up four tents and uprooted approximately 1,500 olive saplings belonging to families from the al-Motawer and Jabarin clans.
A day earlier, hundreds descended on the village of Al-Mazraa ash-Sharqiya, south of Taybeh, for the funeral of two young men killed during a settler attack on Friday.
The occupied West Bank is home to more than three million Palestinians who live under harsh Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority governing in limited areas separated from each other by a myriad of Israeli checkpoints.
Israel has so far built more than 100 settlements across the West Bank, which are home to about 500,000 settlers who live illegally on private Palestinian land.