Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem targeted in apparent hate crime

After two weeks without such an incident, Palestinians in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat woke up Monday to find the tires of 20 vehicles slashed and Hebrew slogans spray-painted on the walls of several homes in an apparent hate crime attack.

The graffiti messages included “Jews wake up” and “administrative” — slogans often found at the scene of so-called “price tag attacks,” which perpetrators say are in retaliation for Palestinian violence or government policies perceived as hostile to the settler movement.

The Shin Bet security services have long pegged “hilltop youth” as responsible for carrying out these attacks. These young activists are often referred to as such due to their practice of setting up illegal outposts on West Bank hilltops.

The far-right ideologues have increasingly spoken out against administrative orders that the defense establishment have been regularly issuing against them for the past two years.

The orders, when used to prevent settler violence, can include detention, bans from entering the entire West Bank, and bans on contacting certain individuals, as well as nightly curfews.

Opponents argue that they rob individuals of due process.

The incident in Shuafat was the first apparent hate crime in May after a month marred by at least 16 attacks, primarily in the West Bank but also in East Jerusalem and northern Israel.

Police are investigating the various attacks, but no arrests have been reported.

Attacks have included the chopping down of dozens of olive trees, the torching of a mosque, stones thrown through car windows, and graffiti calling for the murder of Arabs.

Israeli settlers also suffered property damage in at least one April incident that they blamed on Palestinians. Police said they had opened an investigation after some 150 grapevines in a vineyard belonging to a resident of the Jordan Valley settlement of Tomer were chopped down overnight.

Separately, early Monday morning, a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a Jewish home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. A police officer who was operating in the area at the time was lightly injured and was taken to a nearby hospital for further treatment.

Police said they were still searching for the perpetrator.