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HEBRON (Ma'an) -- A group of Israeli settlers set a Palestinian home on fire by throwing Molotov cocktails at it early Wednesday, an official in the southern West Bank said.

The mayor of Yatta, near the southern West Bank village of al-Deirat where the incident occurred, told Ma'an that the incident was "very dangerous and aimed to kill an entire family of seven, including five children."

Mayor Moussa Makhamreh said that a group of Israelis from the nearby Jewish-only settlement of Karmel broke the windows of Mahmoud Muhammad Jaber al-Adra's home at around 3:00 a.m., throwing Molotov cocktails inside and spraying racist slogans on the outside walls.

The slogans included "Death to Arabs" and "Respectfully Leave."

Makhamreh said that a large part of the family's living room was destroyed by fire in the attack.

Following the attack, Israeli police arrived at the scene of the crime and listened to al-Adra and his neighbors' testimonies of the incident.

The Jewish-only settlement of Karmel is notorious for its residents' violent attacks and threats against local Palestinians

The settlement is located in the South Hebron Hills, which lie almost entirely in Area C, the 62 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Around 3,000 Israeli settlers live in illegal Jewish-only settlements in the Yatta region, according to the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem.

The safety of these settlers is often given as an excuse for the forced displacement of Palestinians who live in villages in the area.