Israeli forces Tuesday afternoon assaulted two Palestinians at Solomon’s Pools, south of Bethlehem, according to security sources.

They said that some 15 military vehicles stormed the tourist site and the soldiers deployed in the nearby forests and conducted a thorough search.

The gun-toting soldiers brutally beat two young men who happened to be at the site, inflicting bruises across their bodies, before denying Palestinians access to the site.

Jewish settlers frequently storm Solomon‘s Pools, a famous cultural site visited by many tourists around the world, in what Palestinians fear is a prelude to taking it over.

Visits by Israeli Jews to sites across the West Bank often cause tensions with local Palestinians, as these visits are accompanied by large armed escorts.

Located near the Palestinian village of Artas, Solomon‘s Pools are three rectangular shaped large cisterns, each more than 100 meters long and which can hold up to 116,000 cubic meters of water, were historically part of an ancient aqueduct system connected to Jerusalem.

Adjacent to the Pools lie the remains of an ancient Ottoman fort set in a beautiful grove of pine and cypress trees. The actual reservoirs were in use up until 1946.

Israel uses the Jewish nationalist name “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the occupied West Bank to reinforce its bogus claims to the territory and to give them a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.

There are over 700,000 Israeli settlers living in colonial settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israel’s nation-state law that passed last July stated that building and strengthening the colonial settlements is a “national interest.”

Source: Palestine News & Info Agency