Israel must protect West Bank’s Palestinians amid settler pogroms: US envoy

United States ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has met with several local officials and residents in the occupied West Bank, including Palestinian Americans attacked in violent Israeli settler pogroms.

The diplomat said on Saturday that the Israeli government has a “responsibility” to ensure the safety of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank after a sharp rise in pogroms.

“One of the messages that we have been sending and we will continue to send is that people in these communities have a right to live with a level of security and safety, and that the government has a responsibility to make sure that happens,” Huckabee told reporters on Saturday.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim , reporting from Turmus Aya in the occupied West Bank, said that Huckabee not only met local officials, “but also Palestinian Americans who live in the village of Turmus Aya and have been seeing firsthand the effects of settler pogroms and violence, part of the whole escalation by settlers in the occupied West Bank”.

“They want the US ambassador to relay the message that this is systematic violence being practised against Palestinians, that it’s continuing and that they need actual change,” Ibrahim said, noting that settlers in the area “wrote slogans not just against Palestinians, but also against him [Huckabee]”.

One person Huckabee met was US-Palestinian Ruwan Alqam, who relocated to Turmus Aya from the US state of Texas with her family four months ago.

But every time Alqam’s family leaves their occupied West Bank home, “we’re hit with roadblock after roadblock, settlers after settlers”, she told Al Jazeera, shortly after attending a morning meeting with  Huckabee.

On a recent day trip to Nablus, the family was unable to return home as Israeli settlers attacked their car with rocks, Alqam said.