Cars burned and Hebrew revenge graffiti left in villages near Ramallah

Settlers set fire to vehicles and spray-painted Hebrew graffiti in two Palestinian villages near Ramallah in the central West Bank overnight, according to Palestinian reports carried by several Israeli news outlets on September 28. Ynet reported that the attackers left the area before Israeli security forces reached it, that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) condemned the incident, and that police had opened an investigation without, so far, arresting anyone.

The Times of Israel named the villages as Deir Abu Mashal and Ras Karkar, both near Ramallah. In Deir Abu Mashal, it said, the messages written in Hebrew included "Happy holiday from the happy Jews" and "Revenge Ein Raya". A brief alert from Ynet's news channel said, citing Palestinians, that a tractor was among the vehicles set alight.

What was reported in Deir Abu Mashal

The Times of Israel embedded a post from the Palestinian outlet Shehab News Agency, timed at 3:16 AM, which said settlers burned vehicles and wrote hostile slogans while attacking a house in Deir Abu Mashal, a village it placed northwest of Ramallah. The Times of Israel described the reports of cars burned in Ras Karkar as a separate incident in a nearby village.

The graffiti gives some indication of how the attackers framed their actions. According to the Times of Israel, the holiday greeting refers to Sukkot, the Jewish festival of booths, a week of celebration in the autumn during which many Israeli families are on holiday. The phrase "happy Jews" appears in the Ynet headline as well, which also quotes the words "blood revenge". The Times of Israel rendered the revenge message as a reference to Ein Raya. The two outlets may be describing the same slogan in different terms, or different slogans; the reports do not make this clear.

The Ein Raya reference

The Times of Israel said "Ein Raya" refers to a recent attack at a natural spring near Neve Tzuf, an Israeli settlement, in which an Israeli man was killed. It described that incident as a terror attack. The reports reviewed here do not give the date of that attack, the name of the man who was killed, or any detail on whether anyone has been held responsible for it. The graffiti suggests the vehicle burnings were presented by those who carried them out as retaliation, though no report attributes the incidents to any named group or individual.

Who is investigating

Crimes by Israelis in the West Bank fall to the Israel Police, while the IDF is responsible for overall security in the territory. The relevant police unit is the Samaria and Judea District, known in Hebrew by the abbreviation Shai; Judea and Samaria is the term the Israeli government and much of the Israeli media use for the West Bank.

N12 correspondent Nitzan Shapira reported that the district police had opened an investigation into the reports and that officers were preparing to enter the scenes, accompanied by IDF troops, to gather findings and evidence and to take testimony. That account indicates that when it was published, police had not yet examined the sites in person.

Ynet placed the incident within what it described as continuing attacks by extremists in the West Bank, and its report included footage of the aftermath. It did not describe the content of the IDF condemnation beyond noting that one was issued.

How the accounts differ

The core facts are consistent across the three organisations: vehicles burned, graffiti sprayed, two villages in the Ramallah area. There are small differences in detail. The Times of Israel headline refers to a single "settler extremist", while its text and the other reports speak of settlers in the plural. Only the Ynet alert mentions a tractor. Only the Shehab post, as relayed by the Times of Israel, mentions an attack on a house. All of these initial details come from Palestinian sources; the Israeli outlets attributed them accordingly.

What the reports do not say

None of the reports gives a number of vehicles burned, the number of attackers, or whether anyone was injured. None says how long the attackers were in the villages, where they came from, or where they went. There is no account from the residents of the house in Deir Abu Mashal beyond the Shehab post. The police had not announced any findings at the time of reporting, and no suspects had been named or detained. The reports also do not say whether the IDF condemnation was accompanied by any operational steps in the area.