The Samaria Regional Council revealed the “shameful” reversal of the facts and demanded their retraction and an apology.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen blasted the United Nations on Sunday for presenting Palestinian terror attacks on Jews in Judea and Samaria as “settler violence”, Channel 14 reported.
“The anti-Israeli campaign called ‘settler violence’ is a false campaign, disconnected from reality, and its entire purpose is to slander an entire population,” he said.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had published a report on its website on the “increase in settler violence,” which claimed that following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, anti-Arab incidents in the disputed region shot up from one per day to seven.
The alleged rise was quoted widely by the international press, and played a role in American officials up to President Joe Biden reprimanding Israel for not reining in the Jewish extremists. Both the United States and France also said they would bar “violent settlers” from entering their countries.
But last week, the Samaria Regional Council revealed that upon examining the report closely with several professionals, they found that hidden on the “Definitions and Clarifications” page, it said that the “settler-related incidents” included “violence, intimidation or trespass carried out by or against [emphasis added] Israeli settlers and other Israeli civilians in the West Bank.”
Cohen, who received the bombshell investigation results from Council head Yossi Dagan, said that if true, “It is a serious matter. I will demand answers from the United Nations and I will also instruct the ministry of foreign affairs to forward the data … to our ambassadors around the world so that they can refute this blood libel.”
The Israel Police came out with a report just last week with statistics that showed that Jewish nationalist violence against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria have actually gone down 50% since the start of the war, in comparison to the same period last year, with some 100 incidents in total.
Meanwhile, over the first nine weeks of the war, there were 1,388 Palestinian terror attacks in the region, including 70 drive-by shootings and 287 attacks using explosives.
Dagan was furious at the UN deception.
“The decision to present all cases of violence against residents of Judea and Samaria as ‘settler violence’ is an unprecedentedly serious act and a flagrant violation of any ethical code, which gives rise to an antisemitic campaign against the Jews in Judea and Samaria with the imprimatur and encouragement of the UN,” he said.
It is “unequivocal proof ,“ he said, “that the ‘settler violence’ campaign is an antisemitic campaign for all intents and purposes, aimed at harming the State of Israel.”
He also made three demands: that the UN immediately retract the “false and shameful data,” apologize, and publish instead the number of Palestinian acts of terror against Israeli residents of the region.
There have been 5,673 such attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2023 according to the Israeli police, with 1,641 of them deemed serious, such as shooting, stabbing, ramming and bomb-throwing. Over two dozen Jews were murdered, with more dozens injured in the various attacks.