Hardline settlers demand Netanyahu resignation following West Bank violence

Hundreds of Israeli settlers took to the streets to call on Israel’s prime minister to step down following a week of violence in the occupied West Bank.

Hardline settlers had expressed their discontent at the way prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu reacted to killings of settlers, despite Israeli forces sustaining a clampdown on the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

"I'm here because we want to ask the Prime Minister to take real and more effective actions, to combat terror and the hostility and the cruel and senseless murdering that's going on by low animals that call themselves human beings.

"Those people murdered my grandchild a few days ago, who hadn't even been born; and wounded my daughter who nearly died as well as my son-in-law. This has to stop. We are a democracy, we respect freedom, and this cannot be tolerated anymore” said protestor Chaim Silberstein.

His pregnant daughter was injured and left miscarried in a drive by shooting at the illegal Ofra settlement, near occupied Nablus on Sunday.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. More than 600,000 Israeli Jews live in settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in a bid to illegally annex the Palestinian territory.

All Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank are classed as illegal under international law, particularly article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which asserts that "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies".

Israeli forces and settlers routinely harass Palestinians in the occupied territories through harming and killing civilians, demolishing homes, poisoning livestock, vandalising property and other forms of violence.

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