Settler violence near Susia

An elderly shepherd, his wife and a nephew said they were attacked by four masked men for allowing their animals to graze near the settlement of Susia.

Today BBC carries a report on an attack on some Palestinians by settlers near the village of Susia. It's good to see this kind of story being reported. However there are some glaring omissions. For starters, BBC did not feel the need to follow up the incident with the local police or army. Are either investigating the attack? Judging from the video on the website, and the fact that the Jewish population in the region is small, it ought not to be too difficult to determine who the attackers are. If BBC had done an investigation it would have discovered that settler violence like this is rarely investigated and settlers found to have been involved are almost never charged or prosecuted.

Another matter omitted from the report is the fact that the Palestinians of Susia, whom I visited last month, live in very basic conditions. One of the main reasons for this is that they were actually evicted from their homes in 1986 by settlers. From their camp site you can even see the settlement that rests on the land where they used to live. Israeli military police have frequently destroyed their homes on the land they currently inhabit on numerous occasions over the past 20 years. Try to imagine what you'd feel like if this had happened to you: not only evicted, but routinely having your very humble new dwellings constantly destroyed and exposed to attacks by settlers in the knowledge nothing is going to be done about it.

Rather than reporting the attack as an isolated or decontextualised incident, BBC has a responsibility to report on these wider, more significant crimes.