Israeli settlers set fire to mosque in Marda and spray anti-Arab slogans on the walls
_Officials in Salfit say the Bar al-Walidain mosque was targeted in an arson attack that also left racist graffiti on the building's facade._
Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in the village of Marda in the occupied West Bank on 2024-12-20, according to an Al Jazeera report in the packet. The building targeted was the Bar al-Walidain mosque, and the attack also left anti-Arab slogans spray-painted on the facade, including phrases such as “Revenge” and “Death to Arabs” in Hebrew.
The Salfit governor, Abdallah Kamil, said settlers had previously entered the village “under the protection of the Israeli army,” a detail that underscores how sensitive and contested the security environment has become in the occupied West Bank. Another local resident told AFP that the settlers set fire to the mosque entrance and wrote slogans on its walls, while a village council head described the incident as a systematic terror attack. The fire was reportedly extinguished before it engulfed the whole structure, but the symbolism of the attack was already clear: a place of worship had been targeted and marked with sectarian abuse.
The report places the incident within a broader pattern of settler violence that has intensified since the Gaza war began in October 2023. It says there had been at least 1,400 settler attacks in the West Bank by October 2024, and that at least 803 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since the start of the war. Those figures are broad contextual indicators rather than a direct count for this attack, but they explain why the arson drew such fast condemnation.
Palestine's Foreign Ministry called the incident a blatant act of racism, while Israeli police and Shin Bet said they would act resolutely to bring the perpetrators to justice. That pairing matters because it shows the political and security response moving in opposite directions: Palestinians saw a hate crime tied to an atmosphere of incitement, while Israeli agencies treated the fire as a grave criminal matter requiring prosecution.
The source excerpt does not confirm whether arrests were made or whether the attackers were identified. Still, the facts supported by the packet are enough to show the severity of the incident. A mosque was targeted, desecrated with racial slogans and nearly destroyed by fire in a village already exposed to repeated settler violence. In the occupied West Bank, that combination is not just local vandalism; it is a flashpoint with regional consequences.
For news reporting, the most important point is direct and supported: the mosque fire in Marda was not an isolated graffito case but a coordinated arson and defacement attack in the midst of a wider wave of settler violence.
