Israeli minister brushes off US terrorism label for suspected settler killing

An Israeli official brushed off on Tuesday the rare U.S. use of the term “terror attack” to condemn the killing of a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank, as a court ruled one of the Jewish settlers held as suspects be released to house arrest.

With U.S.-sponsored peacemaking stalled for almost a decade, Washington has watched worriedly as West Bank violence spirals, including with settler revenge riots in which many Palestinians, among them U.S. dual nationals, have suffered property damage.

Israeli police arrested the two settlers over the killing on Friday of a 19-year-old Palestinian near Burqa village in what their lawyers say was a self-defence shooting by one of them at a much larger group of rock-throwers.

“We strongly condemn yesterday’s terror attack by Israeli extremist settlers,” the U.S. State Department’s Near East Bureau said on Saturday, in its first application of the term in the context of settler violence.

Police initially accused the settlers of “deliberate or depraved-indifference homicide” with a racist motivation, but a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet argued that culpability for the Burqa death was far from clear.

“I wouldn’t advise treating the U.S. definition as a precise professional definition. At the end of the day, they are not drawing on intelligence, but on media reports,” said Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a former counterterrorism chief for Israel’s Shin Bet security service.

“Everything gets poured into media reports – things that are correct, things that are wrong, tendentious and other things. In the end of the day, what is important as far as we are concerned is what happened there,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.

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Jerusalem District Court heard arguments that the suspects – one of whom had been hospitalised, with a police guard, for a head wound – should be freed pending possible prosecution.

It ruled one should be released to house arrest while the other will be kept in remand in hospital.

“Their act was to save lives – their lives and others’ lives,” defence lawyer Nati Rom told reporters.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned the court decision, saying it would encourage further violence, and Israel Police said it would seek to appeal the ruling.

Separately, Israeli forces arrested five Palestinians from Burqa in an apparent effort to expand the investigation. They were due to appear before a military court in the West Bank.

The State Department appeared disinclined on Monday to elaborate on its sharpened censure over the Burqa killing.

“The thinking is that it was a terror attack, and we are concerned about it, and that’s why we called it that,” spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.

“We have made quite clear our concerns, but I would note that the government of Israel has made an arrest in this case and is seeking to hold the perpetrator accountable, and that’s an appropriate action.”