A car full of senior British diplomats was attacked today by a Jewish settler in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron.

The diplomats were visiting from London and Brussels to assess the situation in the ancient city, where around 700 Jewish settlers live under massive Israeli army and police protection amid some 180,000 Palestinians.

The city has been a major friction point, with Palestinians and Israeli human rights groups accusing the hardline religious settlers of attacking the Palestinian population with impunity.

The attack came as British officials were being given a tour by Breaking the Silence, a British-funded organisation led by former Israeli soldiers who have served in the city – home to the tombs of several Biblical patriarchs – and who have become angered by the violence of the settlers.

The diplomats, who were traveling in an armoured car, were trying to leave the city through the large settlement of Kiryat Arba, close to the city centre, when a settler’s car pulled in front of them, blocking their way, a British diplomatic source told The Times.

A “well known settler trouble-maker” then jumped out and started kicking the vehicle, the source said. The British diplomats reversed and tried to leave the scene, but the settler jumped in his car and again pulled in front of them and started thumping and kicking the vehicle. Another group of settlers refused to open the gates to Kiryat Arba to prevent the British vehicle from entering.

The British diplomats called the Israeli police, at which point the settler accused them of trying to run him over and called an ambulance, the British source said.

Nobody was injured, but the diplomat said: “We do regard it as a serious incident.”

Israeli human rights groups who monitor Hebron warn that settler violence has been increasing in recent weeks, partly as a result of the chaos within the Israeli government and partly because one of the Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem – which also receives British Foreign Office funding – has distributed around 100 video cameras to Palestinians to document the violence, mainly by settlers but also by the Israeli security forces.

The first results of the project were felt recently by the Israeli Army when a Palestinian activist filmed an Israeli soldier firing a rubber bullet at close range into the leg of a bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoner, while a senior officer held the detainee by the arm. The officer this week resigned his command but will continue to serve in the Army.

Assaf Peled, B’Tselem’s coordinator for the project, called Shooting Back, said that, in Hebron, three of the cameras had been broken by settlers, sometimes after they had been confiscated by Israeli soldiers.