Israeli settlers attacked and fired in the direction of two Agence France-Presse journalists Tuesday as they were reporting on settler violence against Palestinian olive farmers in the West Bank, the French news agency said.
AFP photographers Jaafar Ashtiyeh and John Wessels were in the northern village of Aqraba to follow up on an incident the previous night in which several cars were burned, allegedly by settlers, AFP told The Washington Post.
The journalists were taking pictures of an Israeli soldier detaining a man when a driver on a quad bike raced toward them and opened fire, AFP reported. At least six other people also opened fire.
A Palestinian man was shot in the foot, AFP reported, citing the Palestinian Red Crescent.
The men were attacked within 500 meters of a group of Israeli soldiers, Wessel told the agency. The assailants took Ashtiyeh’s camera equipment.
Ashtiyeh, a Palestinian man whom the AFP described as a veteran journalist in the West Bank, tried to escape into a car clearly marked “Press,” the agency reported, but two men jumped on him and “beat him repeatedly with the butts of their rifles.”
“I could hear his screams,” Wessel told AFP. Wessel, too, was threatened at gunpoint, the agency reported.
Ashtiyeh, 58, was conscious Tuesday evening in a hospital at Nablus, the agency reported. He was being kept overnight for observation. He suffered severe bruising but no broken bones, AFP told The Post.
Phil Chetwynd, AFP’s global news director, called for a “full investigation.”
“It is unacceptable that journalists can be beaten and robbed by armed settlers in front of Israeli security forces who made no attempt to intervene,” he said in a statement.
The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem called the attack a “blatant attempt to intimidate the press and obstruct accurate reporting from the West Bank.”
“International media have a responsibility to tell all sides of the story and will not be deterred by physical assaults or threats,” the association said.
Settler violence in the West Bank has risen sharply in recent months. The Israeli government has shown little interest in reining it in.
The United Nations documented more than 1,600 attacks by settlers causing injury or property damage during the first eight months of the year, an average of more than six a day. At least 76 Palestinians in the West Bank have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers or settlers since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in February, the United Nations’ humanitarian office reports.
Photos taken by Wessels show Ashtiyeh being carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. Other photos show Palestinian men around and on top of a tractor looking on after another man was shot and Palestinians running from gunfire.
Ashtiyeh was injured as he covered the West Bank olive harvest last year, too, AFP reported. In that incident, the agency reported, around 70 Israeli settlers attacked olive pickers and journalists with sticks and stones. Israeli soldiers present did not stop the attackers, Ashtiyeh told the agency at the time.
It was the first time in his 30-year career, he said, that he had “faced violence of this kind.”
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