WASHINGTON: President Biden issued an executive order on Thursday that aims to punish Jewish settlers who attack Palestinians in the occupied West Bank following the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Biden’s order establishes a system for imposing financial sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals who are found to have attacked or intimidated Palestinians or seized their property, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
US officials said four people are being sanctioned under the order, which cuts them off from the American financial system along with any assets or property in the US, and prevents them travelling to the US. They said more people would be sanctioned in the future. Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians “pose a grave threat to peace, security, stability in the Middle East region, and they also obstruct the realisation of ultimately an independent Palestinian state,” an official said.
In response to the order, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the far-right pro-settlement party Religious Zionism, said: “The ‘settler violence’ campaign is an antisemitic lie that enemies of Israel disseminate with the goal of smearing the pioneering settlers and settlement enterprise, and to harm them and thus smear the State of Israel.”
The announcement of the sanctions came just hours before Biden was set to hold a campaign event in Michigan, a key battleground state that has a large Arab American population and has been the site of numerous protests about the president’s actions.