Photographer Heidi Levine was hospitalized after allegedly being attacked by Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Friday, according to her employer, The Washington Post. The attack is the latest reported instance of an American journalist facing violence, allegedly from Israeli settlers, in the West Bank, home to about 3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers. Israeli settlements in the West Bank remain a flash point for the region.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said at least 1,500 Palestinians had been displaced due to lack-of-permit demolitions, and more than 2,600 “in the context of settler violence.” Israeli leaders have condemned the violence from settlers. Levine’s injuries occurred as dozens of Israeli settlers allegedly attacked Palestinian villagers harvesting olives on Friday, the Post reported. Levine was wearing a protective vest labeled “PRESS” but was knocked to the ground and kicked.
Her cameras and phone were taken. She was treated at a hospital in Ramallah. Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, a blogger who filmed the attack, told the Post that Levine was beaten by settlers using sticks.
Khrzhanovskiy also said that Israeli troops arrived shortly before the attack and “did absolutely nothing about the settlers.” At least 1,600 settler attacks resulting in “casualties, property damage or both have been recorded across 275 Palestinian communities” during the first nine months this year, according to the report. Newsweek reached out to the U.S. State Department via contact form and Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry via email for comment.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X that the “confrontation” remains under investigation and that Israel “condemns violence against anyone.” Still, he said, “serious questions remain.” “Reports indicate some 200 Arabs and far-left activists confronted approximately 40 Israeli youths," he wrote. "Footage shows masked individuals on both sides hurling objects, amid reports of fireworks fired at Jewish youths. Other footage appears to show Levine knocked down and immediately helped to her feet by the same unidentified individual.” Israel would “not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” he wrote.
Netanyahu has condemned settler violence in past cases. The organization T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, a coalition of rabbis with a goal to “act on the Jewish imperative to respect and advance the human rights of all people,” wrote in a statement that the attack is “horrifying.” “What we are witnessing across the West Bank is a campaign of state-backed ethnic cleansing, in which violent settlers terrorize Palestinian communities, often with the protection or complicity of the Israeli military, to drive families from land they have lived on for generations,” the statement reads. J Street described the attack as a “stain on the State of Israel for the world to see: Jewish supremacists terrorizing Palestinians while those charged with protecting them do nothing.” Progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan wrote on X: “I can’t think of any other place in the world where people can regularly attack American citizens, American journalists, like this and our US political and media elites say nothing.
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