The crew had finished the interview and was walking back down the hill when a car with Israeli plates came up the slope in reverse. NBC's account describes it as gray. A masked man in a blue tracksuit leaned out of the rear window with a stick in his hand. Video of the moment shows the car stop and at least four men in dark clothing, faces covered, come out of it swinging.
They beat the journalists and they beat the family the journalists had come to see. They used sticks, rocks, and whatever was in reach. They smashed a camera and wrecked the crew’s vehicle.
“They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car,” said NBC international correspondent Matt Bradley, who was hit twice in the arm and treated at a nearby clinic.
The couple were taken to a hospital in Ramallah. Other injured journalists were treated at a medical center in Qabalan.
The accounts differ on scale and on names. NBC says four of its team were on the scene and identifies the woman as Aida Ahmed Abdullah. WAFA and The New Arab name the couple as Mahmoud and Aida al-Tubasi and put the press group at eight, with five hurt.
Either way, an American network was attacked in daylight, on camera, in the occupied West Bank. The men who did it made no attempt to hide the fact that they were being filmed, and as of this writing no arrests have been reported.
The family did not happen to be in Jalud that day, but they were the story. Settlers had besieged their homes on the edge of the village and then simply moved into them. The family the crew came to interview had already lost the argument about who lives there. Then the men who won it came back to beat them in front of the cameras.
Understand what that requires. Not just rage, but also a calculation. Someone weighed the presence of an American news crew, with lenses running and a network’s lawyers behind it, and concluded that it changed nothing about what would happen to him afterward. He was right, and the record of the last two months says so plainly.
Four days before Jalud, on August 25, a three-person AFP team was in Jannatah south of Bethlehem, covering Israeli activists helping Palestinians fence their own land. Masked settlers surrounded the activists and reporters and went at them with clubs. It happened in front of Israeli soldiers, one of whom was filmed taking hold of a journalist’s camera and ordering him out of the area. Five people were treated for injuries. Nobody was arrested. A settler WhatsApp group posted footage of the attack that evening and then deleted it, which suggests they knew what they had and were briefly unsure whether they needed to care.
The pattern is older than this month. Last July, a Deutsche Welle team was chased and stoned while filming in Sinjil and had its car smashed. Days later, settlers attacked a CNN crew in the same village. The Foreign Press Association, which represents four hundred journalists working in Israel and the territories, said at the time that the attacks came in broad daylight and that it knew of no arrests in any of them.
This July, on the first anniversary of the killing of Sayfollah Musallet, a twenty-year-old American beaten to death by settlers, another CNN crew went to Sinjil and was surrounded with rods, stones and a knife. That time there were four arrests. It took an American network, in daylight, at the exact spot where settlers had killed an American. Musallet’s family told CNN that in the year since his death, nobody had been arrested for that.
This is the ground on which the world’s deadliest campaign against journalists has been built. The Committee to Protect Journalists counts at least 263 journalists and media workers killed since October 2023, the overwhelming majority Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ started keeping records in 1992. Two consecutive years have broken the global record for press deaths, with Israel responsible for roughly two-thirds of the world’s total in each. Brown University’s Costs of War project found that more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the American Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the wars in Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan combined.
Numbers that large stop landing after a while, so hold onto the smaller one. Four men, one car, one hillside, and a camera pointed straight at them.
Netanyahu condemned it. He described the attackers as a handful of rioters and complained that they damage Israel’s standing in the world and get in the army’s way. Two weeks ago, when settlers were besieging families a few kilometers away in Qusra, the American ambassador Mike Huckabee called the men doing it Israeli terrorists. That siege is now in its twenty-first day and the families inside are still rationing water.
So we already know what a condemnation is worth here. It is only worth the breath it takes. The men in Jalud have watched the ambassador of their patron use the word terrorist and watched nothing follow it, and they have drawn the obvious conclusion.
The NBC crew will file its report and go home. That difference is the whole point of the beating. The couple are in a hospital in Ramallah, and the house they were interviewed about is still full of the men who took it. The Palestinian journalists who cover this every day have no network behind them and nowhere else to be. They are the ones on the list CPJ keeps.
A camera used to be a kind of protection. Somebody has made sure everyone in the West Bank now knows it is not.
An international armed force needs to go into Gaza and the West Bank and removed, jail all these thugs.
Please make it clear that Israel has killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians since the Nakba…where have the press been during this genocide ?