10,000 new settlers within 10 months: Israel.

An Israeli minister has predicted there will be 10,000 new settlers in the occupied West Bank over the next 10 months and insisted that a moratorium did not freeze but only limited construction.

The minister was saying this to try to placate extremist protesters who are engaging in civil disobedience (and worse) over the supposed freeze on settlement building that is currently in place. That didn’t stop settlers from going into a West Bank village and torching the local mosque.

Palestinians in the West Bank village of Kufur Yasuf, near Nablus, said a gang of Jewish settlers forced their way into the local mosque on Thursday night, doused carpets and copies of the Quran with petrol, and set them ablaze.

Graffiti scrawled in Hebrew at the threshold said it was “the price-tag” — an expression used by hardline settlers for systematic acts of vengeance against Palestinians.