The Washington Post photojournalist who was attacked and seriously injured by Israeli settlers on the West Bank on Friday has described how she was saved with the help of local Palestinians. Heidi Levine sustained four fractured vertebrae, two broken ribs and four puncture wounds when she was knocked to the ground and repeatedly beaten by a crowd of masked settlers while she and other journalists were covering the olive harvest in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah, north of Ramallah. It is unclear whether the puncture wounds were caused by knives or other weapons.
Levine said a witness to her attack had seen nails sticking out of some of the wooden clubs wielded by her attackers. Levine, 64, has covered multiple wars and had just returned from an assignment in Ukraine before Friday’s attack. She said she would most likely have been killed had she not been wearing protective body armour and a helmet.
Levine pointed out that Palestinians did not have such protection and more than 20 had been killed in settler attacks so far this year, in the course of an escalating campaign of aggression – described as terrorism by Israeli security leaders – across the West Bank aimed at driving Palestinians from their land. She said the olive harvesting at Abu Falah had begun peacefully but at some point a group of young masked settlers appeared on a nearby hilltop watching the group of Palestinian villagers, journalists and human rights activists accompanying them. Levine said the attack began only after the Israeli army arrived on the scene.
Some of the farmers started to gather their tarps and bags of olives that they had picked,” she said. I started to run … It was just like a lot of commotion and then all of a sudden I see a dozen of them and they started charging at me. Otherwise my whole face would have been broken and I could have suffered brain damage or lost an eye.
I can’t even count how many times, probably more than a hundred times. I actually tried playing dead so that they would stop. But it didn’t work.” Witnesses said the beating only ceased when young Palestinian men used slingshots to aim stones at settlers forcing them back, allowing another American journalist, Jasper Nathaniel, to reach Levine and, with other reporters, help her to safety.
It was like a biblical battle,” Levine said. After the attack, Nathaniel wrote: “Had the shabab not stepped up to protect her, she might well be dead. It is no exaggeration to say that young Palestinians armed only with stones risked their lives to save Heidi Levine’s.” He said the army pursued the young Palestinians in the wake of the incident, rather than the settlers.
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