The residents of the Palestinian occupied West Bank village of Burqa, near Nablus, reported that their mosque "Al Nour" has been torched overnight.

Defamatory slogans found on the walls, including several reading "Mitzpe Yitzhar" and "War," suggest that the incident is in fact a racist extreme-right act.  According to Ma'an, the Palestinian news agency, at 4 am, worshipers discovered part of the mosque was on fire and were luckily able to extinguish it quickly. The building sustained light damage, mostly to its carpets and chairs. No injuries were reported.

A wall in the torched mosque in Burqa (Photo: B'Tselem)

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the incident saying that "an attack on (Muslim) holy places is a declaration of war on the Palestinians by the settlers." Rudeineh said that the Palestinian Authority holds Israel responsible for such arsons and urged the international community to intervene in the matter.  The attack comes a day after Jewish extremists torched a 13th century mosque in West Jerusalem, spraying "Death to the Arabs" and "Muhammad is a pig" on the building. Despite a string of violent attacks by settlers, including a rampage on an army base, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday rejected a recommendation to classify the right-wing and racists Jewish extremists as terrorists. Settlers frequently desecrate mosques and Muslim cemeteries and destroy Palestinian olive trees and cars.

After the Jerusalem mosque attack, Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel) chairman MK Mohammed Barake lashed out at his fellow parliamentarians for fanning the flames of racial hatred with a spate of draft legislation targeting Israel's Palestinian national minority and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

"Responsibility for the mosque burning does not only lie with the gang of fascists who carried it out, but also with some of the scumbags among the MKs and ministers," he said in a statement.

"Those MKs should not pretend they are shocked when the draft laws they back become a raging fire that devours mosques," he said. MK Barakeh added: "I blame the prime minister himself for this 'price tag' and the rampage, and this is only a week after a bill banning Muezzin calls was submitted. The government cannot wash its hands of this as it green-lights such actions."  And Emek Shaveh, an Israeli NGO which fights against the manipulation of archaeological sites for political gain, said the attack had damaged an important aspect of local heritage.

"The destruction of the antiquities, in this case probably by Israelis, is part of the process of erasure of 'the other' -- of everything that doesn't suit the extremist and one-dimensional ideology of certain Israeli groups," it said in a statement.

Among the words scrawled on the mosque's walls were the names of two settlement outposts slated for demolition -- such attacks are often linked to government attempts to remove outposts.

The arson attack in Jerusalem occurred just 24 hours after settlers attacked troops and an army base in the northern West Bank in an incident that deeply angered Israel's leadership. Several hours earlier, settlers also broke into a closed military zone along the Jordanian border.

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