"It's very inflated. They're referring to a handful of teenagers, about 70 of them, who are not from the West Bank, children from broken homes. They do things like cut down trees and sometimes they try to burn down a home," Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News that aired Tuesday.
The claim stands in stark contrast to the situation described by the UN agency OCHA. Its statistics show, among other things, that in October alone there were at least 264 settler attacks on Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the highest number in almost 20 years.
Since 2006, when the UN began recording settler violence in the West Bank, Israeli settlers have carried out more than 9,600 attacks on Palestinians in the area, some of them fatal. About 15 percent of those - about 1,500 - occurred up to and including November of this year.
