TEL AVIV – Israeli police said on Monday they had arrested eight suspects as part of an investigation into violent incidents in the West Bank over the weekend, including attacks on an American photojournalist and European diplomats in separate incidents, as the United States called on Israel to do more to deter settler violence.
Police did not identify the suspects, who were taken into custody for questioning, or disclose any accusations against them. The investigation was ongoing, police said.
Israeli radio station Galatz reported that the suspects were Israelis and that the Shin Bet domestic security service was taking part in the investigation.
Prosecutions of Israeli settlers are rare.
Masked Israeli settlers were filmed on Friday assaulting Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, a US citizen, who was covering a Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank. Levine was one of at least two people injured in the incident, which took place as settlers attacked Palestinian civilians.
On Saturday, European diplomats and a French mayor were attacked by masked settlers in another part of the West Bank, Belgium’s foreign minister said.
The weekend violence has drawn condemnation from the United States, Israel’s closest ally, and from France, Belgium and Poland, whose diplomats were attacked on Saturday.
The United States wants Israel to do more to deter attacks committed by settlers in the West Bank, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday.
“We’re very disturbed by those images and what we’re seeing,” Rubio told reporters. “We’ve asked the Israelis and continue to ask them to crack down on that stuff.”
The US State Department had inquired about the incident involving Levine, Rubio said, adding that he expected to hear back from the US Embassy in Jerusalem by Sunday. He made the comments before boarding a flight to Uzbekistan.
While Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and the Israeli military blamed “Israeli rioters” for the attack on the diplomats, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition is projected to lose its governing majority at the October 27 election, has been more circumspect.
Netanyahu has said the diplomats entered a “sensitive area with a history of confrontations without prior coordination” with the Israeli military, and that the facts of the attack on Levine were “unclear”.
Settler attacks on Palestinians are surging, with at least 170 reported since September 27, around the start of the annual olive harvest, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that monitors settlements. Journalists, Israeli activists and foreign observers have also been targeted.