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. Four members of an NBC team were interviewing Aida Ahmed Abdullah and her family in the Palestinian town of Jalud, near Nablus. Abdullah said they had been driven out of their home by Israeli settlers, and the team was walking down the 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 with their faces covered leapt out, hitting Abdullah and the crew with sticks and throwing rocks at them.
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.
Three additional members of the NBC News team — a cameraman, producer and driver — 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. Israeli security forces told NBC News they received reports that “Israeli rioters had arrived in the area and that violent clashes had occurred, including stone-hurling toward Palestinians and additional civilians,” addressing violence in nearby Qusra, a Palestinian village that has been besieged by Israeli settlers for weeks.
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. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he condemned 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.” There has been a spate of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. 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.
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