Middle East Monitor / November 16, 2022
An extremist Jewish settler has called for secret cells to be activated in order to carry out attacks against Palestinians and stop resistance against the Israeli occupation, Safa news agency reported on Tuesday. Israeli Kahanist Meir Ettinger is known for leading the Hilltop Youth, a settler group that pursues the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Ettinger is also known for leading the group in what has been known as “price tag” attacks on Palestinian villages. He targets Muslim and Christian sites. Commenting on the Palestinian resistance attack in Ariel, Ettinger said that the army is unable to deter the Palestinians because it is an official body.
“As an alternative to the army, it is possible to activate armed military cells for settlers to carry out massacres of the Palestinians in order to stop their attacks.” The only way to fight terror [sic], he added, is to re-enact the holy revenge operations based on rabbinical theories. He stressed the need for this because the army has become a “complicated” reality.
“The [Israeli] army has been unable to deter the Palestinians for ten years due to disproportionality between the terrorist organizations [sic] and an organized army,” he was reported as saying by Safa.
Ettinger lives in an illegal settlement outpost in Nablus and was involved, it is said, in the July 2015 arson attack on the Dawabshe family home in the village of Duma, south of the city. Both parents and a child were killed, while a surviving child suffered severe burns.
