Israeli settlers on Tuesday evening assaulted a Palestinian mother and her baby in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, according to local sources.

Mufeed Sharbati, a resident, said that a group of hardcore settlers physically assaulted his 23-year-old daughter and her 2-year-old baby at the Ash-Shuhada Street in the city as the latter were on their way for a family visit.

He added that settlers instruct their children to harass Palestinians in the area, as they did with his 10-year-old son on Monday.

Twenty two years ago, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein broke into the Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire at Palestinian Muslim worshippers, killing 29. Four Palestinians were killed on the same day in the clashes that broke out around the Mosque in response to the massacre.

In the aftermath, the mosque, known to Jews as Tomb of the Patriarchs, was divided in two, with the larger part turned into a synagogue while heavy scrutiny was imposed on the Palestinians and areas closed completely to them, including an important market and the main street, Shuhada street.

The city of Hebron, which houses the Ibrahimi Mosque, is home to roughly 160,000 Palestinian Muslims and about 800 notoriously aggressive Israeli settlers who live in compounds heavily guarded by Israeli troops.

Israel has expelled the only international monitors protecting Hebron’s Palestinians from 800 heavily guarded settlers, one of whom committed the 1994 massacre that triggered their deployment.

Such Israeli measures, taken under the guise of security, are intended to entrench Israel’s 53-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and its settler colonial project which it enforces with routine and frequently deadly violence against Palestinians.

Source : Safa