Over 170 Palestinians have been injured so far in 2011 by Israeli violence exercised during illegal settlement activities across the occupied territories, Palestinian officials say.

The officials say hundreds of olive trees, the only source of income to many Palestinian farmers, have also been either uprooted or burned by the extremist Israeli settlers this year, a Press TV correspondent reported Sunday.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli settler-related incidents resulting in Palestinian injuries and damage to property have raised by 57 percent this year.

Dawood Hammoudeh of the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign said every time the Palestinian resistance against the occupation escalates, the “settler attacks rise automatically.”

Israeli forces often assist the settlers in their skirmishes with the Palestinians.

“It is Israel’s plan to perpetuate settlement activities and complete the occupation, to transfer and expel a group for the sake of another. That can only be understood as a classic colonial technique,” said political analyst Ahmad Rafeeq Awad.

The illegal settlers pave the way for the Israeli expansion by setting up illegal outposts on the Palestinian hills.

The indigenous Palestinians are also terrorized through physical violence and the razing of their occupied lands in the process of settlement activities.

In September 2010, the Israeli regime resumed the expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territories after a 10-month partial freeze, prompting the Palestinian Authority leaders to break off the US-sponsored talks with Tel-Aviv that had resumed after a lengthy stalemate.

(Press TV)