Unidentified assailants on Saturday night set fire to a house in the village of Duma in the occupied West Bank, targeting the only witness of an arson attack that killed a Palestinian family previous year.
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The blaze damaged the home of Ibrahim Dawabsha in Duma, the same village where a July firebombing killed an 18-month-old Palestinian boy and his parents.
The owner of the house is Ibrahim Dawabsha, a relative of the family killed previous year and a key witness in the case.
Israeli police spokeswoman Luba al-Samri said that Israeli troops and police arrived the scene and started investigating the attack, adding that “the motives behind the attack are not clear yet”.
Prosecutors said the digital document entitled Kingdom of Evil contained among other things instructions for arson attacks on houses, a transcript released by the Israel Courts Administration said. Some details of the investigation remain under a gag order.
“The window was broken from the outside and flammable materials were found in the rubble”, Colonel Malek Ali, fire chief for the nearby city of Nablus, told AFP.
Saad and Riham Dawabsha, with baby Ali.
People survey the remains of the firebombed Dawabsha home in 2015.
The only survivor of the arson attack is five year old Ahmad Dawabsheh, who has sustained burns on 80% of his body.
Amiram Ben-Uliel, 21, from the northern West Bank settlement of Shilo, was charged with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder, arson and conspiracy to commit a hate crime.
The indictments marked a key breakthrough in the case, which had led to an unprecedented crackdown against Jewish terror suspects, including a decision to extend to Israeli citizens counterterrorism practices such as detention without charge.
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Rabbis for Human Rights’ field researcher Zacharia Sadeh, who first reported the incident, claimed the house belonged to Ibrahim Dawabsheh, a relative and neighbor to the slain Dawabshehs who witnessed parts of the July 2015 attack. His parents died later from the burns suffered in the attack.
