Israeli settlers assaulted a three-person AFP news team in the occupied West Bank village of Jannatah, near Beit Lahm, on Tuesday, injuring at least five people and wrecking vehicles belonging to journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists.
The AFP crew had travelled to Jannatah to cover Israeli activists carrying out solidarity visits with Palestinians facing settler harassment, after settlers recently blocked a road in the area. An altercation broke out between the settlers and the activists, and IOF ordered journalists to leave what it called a "closed military zone." Two more carloads of settlers arrived immediately after.
The settlers, many of them children, hurled stones at journalists and activists. One AFP journalist dodged a stone only to be struck in the chin with a stick by a child settler, drawing blood. When the crew returned to their vehicles, both had been vandalized, with rear windshields smashed and tires slashed. The activists' cars sustained similar damage.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society treated five people for injuries; AFP journalists said they saw at least one Israeli activist taken away in a Palestinian ambulance. During the assault, an IOF soldier confiscated a video journalist's camera before returning it.
Part of an escalating pattern
Tuesday's attack fits a documented surge in settler assaults on press since the war on Gaza began in October 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 11 attacks on at least 23 Palestinian and international journalists by settlers in 2025, up sharply from a single such incident in 2024.
Tuesday's attack is not the first to hit AFP directly. On October 10, 2025, four Palestinian journalists working for AFP, Quds News Network, Al-Ghad TV and Al-Fajr TV were injured in Beita while covering a settler attack on farmers.
Weeks later, on November 8, masked, armed settlers returned to Beita and attacked around ten journalists and media workers covering the olive harvest, severely injuring six, among them Al Jazeera's Muhammad Al-Atrash and Reuters photojournalist Raneen Sawaeh, and destroyed equipment.
In July 2025, settlers armed with clubs, rocks and a knife attacked a CNN crew in Sinjil led by reporter Jeremy Diamond, smashing the vehicle's rear window and puncturing tires, at the same location where settlers beat Palestinian-American Sayfollah "Saif" Musallet to death a year earlier.
That October, American journalist Jasper Nathaniel was stoned and had his car window smashed by settlers in Turmus Ayya while covering an assault on Palestinian farmers.
Source:Websites
