Yitzhar (Hebrew: יִצְהָר) is an Israeli settlement located in the West Bank, south of the city of Nablus, just off Route 60, north of the Tapuach Junction.
[6][7][8] In May 2014, Shin Bet said the price-tag hate crimes were mainly attributable to about 100 extremist youth, mostly from Yitzhar, acting on ideas associated with rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg at the community's Od Yosef Chai yeshiva.
One of the Israeli settlements ringing the city of Nablus, Yitzhar is built on the ridge of Salmen al Parsi, a mountain 808 meters above sea level south of Mount Grizim.
The office of Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu responded that Israel regards with the utmost severity the imposition of sanctions' Israeli citizens.
Only Israeli labor is employed, and all private homes, community buildings, and internal roads and development are done by Jews only, mainly residents of the settlement itself, according to the Shomron Regional Council's website.
[9] Education is a priority of the community, and several institutions operate locally: a day-care center, pre-schools, the boy's Zilberman Talmud Torah, and the Od Yosef Chai ("Joseph Still Lives") institutions headed by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, comprising the Dorshei Yichudcha yeshiva high school, a post-high school yeshiva gedola, previously located in Joseph's Tomb Nablus, headed by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg, and a kollel.
[30][31] According to Haaretz, Israeli security service Shin Bet is urging the Education Ministry to stop funding the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar.
The decision was based on information received from the defense establishment of extensive involvement by students and rabbis in violent acts against Palestinian residents and Israeli security forces.
[32] The inhabitants of Yitzhar, belonging to a category known as hardal (religiously ultra-Orthodox as well as nationalist),[33] have a reputation as being among the most extreme Israeli settlers, and regularly clash with local Palestinian civilians.
"[35]Two Yitzhar residents, Harel Bin-Nun, 18, and Shlomo Liebman, 24, were shot and killed while patrolling a track newly dug to expand the settlement, in an ambush by Arabs on 5 August 1998.
[36][37] Yitzhar settlers reacted by leading an armed funeral cortege past local Palestinian villages, and stating they would expand the settlement in two divisions named after the dead residents, a proposal that received the backing of Binyamin Netanyahu.
The four settlers filed a lawsuit that was partially accepted in March 2010 by the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court which ruled that the police had presented false and misleading testimony by declaring that the four men were involved in the assault and had stolen "the sheep", while they had not witnessed the attacks against the goatherd.
[40] On 13 September 2008, a Palestinian entered the Yitzhar outpost Shalhevet, set fire to a family house whose inhabitants were away for the weekend, and stabbed a nine-year-old boy who had spotted him and tried to call for help, wounding him lightly.
[42] One week later, a fourteen-year-old teenager from Asira al-Qibliya, was shot dead by Israeli border police while walking toward Yitzhar, intending to throw a Molotov cocktail at the settlement.
[45] On 2 August 2011, Israel Defense Forces' GOC Central Command issued administrative restraining orders against 12 settlers from Yitzhar and nearby outposts, and a student at the local yeshiva on suspicions that they were involved in attacks on Palestinians.
According to the Israeli NGO Yesh Din, who had a field worker observing the incident, masked settlers had started the clashes by throwing stones.
[54] On 30 April 2013, a 31-year-old Yitzhar resident, Eviatar Borovsky, was stabbed to death at the Tapuach Junction by a 24-year-old Palestinian from a village near Tulkarm who had been released some six months earlier from an Israeli jail after serving three years in prison for throwing stones.
[59] The Border Police had come to the community to demolish five illegally built structures, after Yitzhar residents had punctured the tires of military vehicles in two earlier instances.
[61] In response, armed Israeli soldiers seized control of the Ode Yosef Chai ("Joseph Yet Lives") seminary, which also functions as a synagogue, and built a barbed-wire cordon around the building.
[62] Six former heads of Israel's Shin Bet security agency described the attack by the settlers in an interview with Yediot Ahronot as an episode of "Jewish terror".
A young woman from Yitzhar was arrested in May for incitement of violence, after posting on a community e-mail site the remark: "I support throwing rocks (at Jews, and of course on Arabs without question).