Ramallah, April 5 (RHC)-- A number of Israeli settlers escorted by troops have confiscated a large area of private Palestinian land and razed agricultural property in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.

 Local Palestinian media reports said that several bulldozers belonging to settlers under the heavy protection of Israeli soldiers entered a village in the West Bank district of Nablus on Thursday morning.

 Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official in charge of monitoring Israel's settlement expansion activities, confirmed that extremist settlers from the Yitzhar settlement stormed the Karm Abu Salim area in the Burin village and seized lands planted with fruitful trees.

 The illegal Israeli land grab in the occupied West Bank is a regular occurrence by extremist settlers and the Israeli military.  In recent years, Israeli settlers have been frequently caught on camera vandalizing Palestinian farms in the occupied West Bank and stealing their olive harvest.

 Palestinians say the thefts and vandalism occur mainly on Palestinian land near settlements that they can only reach by coordinating ahead of time with the Israeli military.  Most of the attacks carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property are met with impunity, with those guilty rarely facing consequences for such actions.

 Rights groups, including Yesh Din and B’Tselem, have on several occasions slammed the regime in Tel Aviv for failing to protect Palestinians from settler violence or investigate attacks.

 A new report last month said that Israel had so far occupied more than 85 percent or some 27,000 square kilometers of historical territories of Palestine in an expropriation process which still continues unabated.