Zionist settlers set fire to a mosque in the West Bank

According to the Ma’an news agency, today settlers set fire to parts of a mosque in the town of Deir Istiya in Salfit governorate in the northern West Bank and sprayed racist slogans in Hebrew on its walls.

Eyewitnesses said a group of settlers stormed the town at dawn today, broke the mosque’s windows and threw an incendiary object inside, causing the blaze in the Al-Hajja Hamida Mosque.

Local residents and civil defense teams, the report said, managed to control and extinguish the fire before it spread further after parts of the mosque had been damaged.

Settlers had previously set fire to the Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib Mosque in Deir Istiya and to other mosques in the villages of Marda and Yasuf.

In this regard, the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs condemned the heinous crime in a statement, stressing that burning a mosque represents the barbarism and provocative actions of the Israeli regime against Islamic and Christian holy sites in Palestine.

The statement said that given the repeated assaults by the occupying regime and settlers, places of worship are no longer safe.

Local sources say settlers’ attacks on Palestinians and their property in the West Bank take place with the support of Israeli occupying forces, and that the burning of this mosque is part of repeated assaults on places of worship and Islamic sanctities. According to Palestinian legal organizations, dozens of incidents this year — including mosque arson, desecration of the Qur’an, and graffiti calling for the expulsion or killing of Palestinians — have been recorded.