President Joe Biden issued an executive order Thursday targeting Israeli settlers in the West Bank following the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old U.S. citizen last month.
Biden’s order will target settlers who “directly perpetrated violence and those who engaged in repeated acts of intimidation and destruction of property, leading to the forced displacement of Palestinian communities,” according to a senior Palestinian official. administration. The sanctions focus on visa restrictions for foreign nationals, some of whom have already been prosecuted in Israeli courts.
The sanctions do not address US citizens who may also perpetrate settler violence.
The decision was taken following the death of American teenager, Tawfic Hafeth Abdel Jabbar, who was shot and killed last month during a visit to the West Bank to learn more about his Palestinian heritage. His family claims he was a victim of settler violence.
Abdel Jabbar’s father said his son had gone out for a picnic with friends when witnesses told him the 17-year-old had been shot dead by an Israeli settler. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at the time that he was not aware of the full context but that the White House was “seriously concerned” about the teen’s death.
More than 300 Palestinians have been killed by security forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, not including thousands killed in Gaza, according to United Nations data.
There were 494 settler attacks against Palestinians between October 7 and January 31. according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The State Department said in December this would amount to imposing a travel ban on certain settlers after a wave of settler attacks.
Spokesman Matt Miller said the visa ban would be imposed on “dozens” of extremist Israeli settlers and their family members. It is unclear how many people were affected by the ban.
“The United States has always opposed actions that undermine stability in the West Bank, including attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and Palestinian attacks against Israelis,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement at the time. .
“We have stressed to the Israeli government the need to do more to hold accountable extremist settlers who have carried out violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. As President Biden has repeatedly said, these attacks are unacceptable,” he added.
As settlement violence continued, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated last month that Biden was concerned about “the violence in the West Bank, and much of it is being perpetrated by settlers with extreme opinions and how he absolutely opposes that those who rape must be stopped.”
Benjamin Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and chairman of the far-right Religious Zionist party, called the settler violence an “anti-Semitic lie.” in a post on THURSDAY.
“It is a shame that the Biden administration is cooperating with this at a time when settlers are paying dearly the blood price of their best sons in the Gaza war,” Smotrich wrote, according to an NBC News translation.
He added that he would continue to expand Jewish settlements and that “if the price is the imposition of American sanctions against me, so be it.”
Israeli settlers have called for the reoccupation of Gaza in recent days, gathering at a conference on Sunday at which National Security Minister Ben Gvir said Israel should encourage the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians out of the region. Smotrich was also a keynote speaker at the event and made public statements calling for resettlement from Gaza.
The Gaza Strip has been devoid of Israeli settlers since 2005, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Knesset agreed to withdraw all Israeli presence.
The White House and State Department have publicly condemned the calls for resettlement, strongly affirming the United States’ belief that Gaza should remain Palestinian land.
But settlements continued to expand in the occupied West Bank, leading to increased tensions with the Palestinians, leading to years of violent clashes. Since the October 7 Hamas attack and the resulting war, settler violence has been almost omnipresent in the West Bank.
In the three weeks since the war broke out, the United Nations recorded 132 Palestinians killed by security forces and settlers. The number for all of 2022 was 158 Palestinians, NBC News previously reported.
From the start of the war until January 31, the vast majority of Palestinians killed in settlement areas were killed by Israeli forces, but at least eight were killed by the settlers themselves. In contrast, six Israelis were killed in the West Bank, including four members of Israeli forces, during this period.
The United Nations reported Monday that two international activists were injured last week by armed settlers in the Umm Nir area of Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 26,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, which left 1,200 dead.
