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NABLUS (Ma'an) -- A settler who mistakenly wandered into a northern West Bank village on Sunday has been returned to Israeli authorities by the Palestinian liaison office, an official said.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official who monitors settlement activities in the northern West Bank, told Ma'an that a settler from the illegal Israeli outpost of Homesh "accidentally" walked into the the village of Burqa west of Nablus.

The settler "begged and cried" as he was beaten up by dozens of school children, before locals intervened and took him to the Palestinian liaison office, Daghlas said.

Liaison officials then delivered the man to their Israeli counterparts, he said.

Homesh was evacuated by Israeli authorities in 2005, and in September, Israel's military said that land confiscated in 1978 to build the settlement would be returned to its Palestinian owners in Burqa.

In recent months, however, armed Jewish settlers have been trickling back to try and reestablish a permanent presence there, locals say.

More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.

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Palestinian children beat up settler who wandered into their village
Returned to Israel by Palestinian liaison office after he was rescued by local adults.

By Haaretz | Mar. 24, 2014 | 6:51 PM

The Palestinian liaison office returned a settler who accidentally wandered into a village and was beaten by locals, the Palestinian news service Maan reports.

The settler was rescued by local adults and delivered to the village liason after children began beating him, according to the report.

Complicating the issue is that the settler is reportedly from the former West Bank settement of Homesh, which was one of five evacuated in 2005 and has been gradually repopulated by a creeping process - though all the residential buildings in it were razed.

The village the settler reportedly infiltrated is next-door Burka, on whose lands Homesh is said to have arisen.

For years the Palestinians were prohibited from returning to the lands, which remained subject to a land-seizure order.

In May 2013, the Israeli High Court ruled that the Homesh land should be returned to its original owners. Later that year, Palestinian farmers returned to work their land in the area, a move that Haaretz's Chaim Levinson predicted was likely to spur the settlers in redoubling their efforts to move back themselves - which locals say has already begun happening.