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by Our Foreign Desk
TWO Israeli settler extremists were charged yesterday with the brutal firebomb murder of a Palestinian toddler and his parents in July.
Amiram Ben-Uliel, a 21-year-old West Bank settler, was named as the main suspect in the attack. A minor was charged as an accessory.
Yinon Reuveni, 20, and another minor were charged for other violence against Palestinians. All four were charged with belonging to a terrorist organisation.
The charges followed months of investigations into extremist groups within the network of illegal settlements built on the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, while his mother Riham and father Saad later died of their horrific burns.
Ali’s four-year-old brother Ahmad survived and is still undergoing treatment in an Israeli hospital.
His relatives have not yet broken the news of his family’s death to the boy, whose sleep is wracked by nightmares of the attack.
Graffiti scrawled in Hebrew on the wall of their home read: “Revenge” and “Price tag” — a code for settler attacks on Palestinians in retribution for trivial limitations on their expansion imposed by Tel Aviv.
Israel’s government has tolerated such attacks as extremist settlers have become increasingly politically powerful.
In September a UN report revealed that less than one in 10 reports of settler attacks on Palestinians result in charges, while 95 per cent of Israeli allegations against Palestinians end up in court.
Anger at the savage murder of the Dawabshehs is said to have spurred knife and car-ramming attacks on settlers and Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in recent months.
While 21 Israelis have died, 131 Palestinians have been killed by occupation troops — many of them young protesters.
On Saturday thousands flooded the West Bank city of Hebron for the funeral of 14 Palestinians whose bodies had finally been returned to their families on Friday, along with nine others.
Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said on November 5 that their frozen remains would be handed over on the condition that they be buried immediately — at night — so few people could attend their funerals.
