Masked Israeli settlers attacked and injured a Palestinian woman and members of an NBC News team reporting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday.
Three members of an NBC team were interviewing Aida Ahmed Abdullah and her family in the Palestinian town of Jalud, near Nablus, when the attack occurred. Abdullah said they had been driven out of their home by Israeli settlers, and the team was walking down a hill toward the house.
A gray car with Israeli license plates then drove in reverse up the hill toward them, video of the incident shows.
A masked man in a blue tracksuit, holding a stick, was leaning out of the rear passenger window as the vehicle approached. When the car stopped, at least four men in dark clothes and with their faces covered leaped out, hitting Abdullah and the crew with sticks and throwing rocks at them.
“They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car,” said NBC News international correspondent Matt Bradley, who was hit twice in the arm and later treated at a nearby clinic.
Abdullah, 51, who was on the ground after the attack, was taken for medical care by the Red Crescent. Her injuries were not life-threatening, according to an Israeli military and Israel Border Police statement. According to her husband, Mahmoud Toubasi, Abdullah’s condition had improved but she remained in the hospital Saturday night.
Two additional members of the NBC News team — a cameraman and producer — were also injured and were treated following the attack.
Producer Lawahez Jabari described how the car rushed up the hill before its occupants beat members of the team and damaged camera equipment and one of the crew’s vehicles.
“Suddenly a car came to us,” she said after receiving medical care. “The settlers had sticks. I saw a gun, but they didn’t use the gun.”
Camera operator Khaldoon Eid, who lives in the West Bank, said he was surprised the attack occurred in the middle of the village.
“We didn’t expect that — that they would come to attack,” he said. “We were in the middle of a Palestinian area next to Palestinian houses.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his spokesman Doron Spielman condemned the violence against Abdullah and the NBC News crew along with several other incidents across the area on Saturday.
Those incidents included dozens of masked Israeli settlers spraying pepper spray at Palestinian workers and throwing rocks at a building in nearby Qusra.
Netanyahu said the “criminal acts of violence committed in the villages of Kosra and Jalud by a handful of rioters who violate the law, cause enormous injustice to the law-abiding settler public, hinder the IDF in fulfilling its missions and harm Israel’s standing in the world.”
Spielman said in a post on X that “their actions violate the law; they endanger both Jews and Arabs, and they interfere with the Israel Defense Forces as they carry out vital security missions, and of course they harm Israel’s international legitimacy.”
Netanyahu, he said, requested that security forces “apprehend the perpetrators and to bring them to justice,” adding Israel “will not tolerate vigilantism of any kind by anyone.”
Israeli security described the regional violence on Saturday, saying they received reports that “rioters had arrived in the area and that violent clashes had occurred, including stone-hurling toward Palestinians and additional civilians.”
“Upon their arrival, the security forces identified dozens of rioters who had barricaded themselves inside a Palestinian home while Palestinian residents were inside,” the statement said.
“The security forces who arrived at the scene initially operated to remove the rioters from the home and separate the groups, in order to protect the residents inside the house. In addition, the security forces confiscated vehicles belonging to the Israeli rioters that were suspected of having been used to reach the area,” the statement said.
“IDF soldiers and Israel Border Police forces continue to operate in the areas of Qusra and Jalud to prevent further disturbances and restore order in the area,” it added.
There has been a spate of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, and the village of Qusra has been besieged by Israeli settlers for weeks.
Between Jan. 1 and July 24, Israeli forces or settlers killed 76 Palestinians, according to the latest data available from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Three Israelis were killed over the same period, the data shows.
Netanyahu’s hard-line government has been accused of turning a blind eye to the settler attacks in the West Bank, which many governments around the world consider illegally occupied. In its statement after the attack, Israeli security forces said they “strongly condemn all forms of violence.”
Captured in the 1967 Middle East war, the West Bank is home to 3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers.
The recent escalation in violence has increased pressure on the Israeli military to stop these armed groups. The United Nations and media workers have also reported an uptick in attacks on foreign, Palestinian and Israeli journalists in the West Bank.
