Activists arrested after footage shows settlers beating them in West Bank

Jasper Nathaniel and Andrey Kharzhanovsky, who are both journalists as well as activists who assist Palestinians in the West Bank, were arrested by police overnight Wednesday in the South Hebron Hills after footage showed them being attacked by two settlers, at least one of them armed.

Nathaniel is an American citizen, while Kharzhanovsky immigrated to Israel in 2022 and holds Israeli citizenship. It was unclear how the confrontation began.

In footage published by a third activist who was at the scene, Adele Shoko, the two could be seen in a physical confrontation with two settlers. Later, one of the settlers, who was armed and at one point appeared to raise his weapon at Kharzhanovsky, forced the activist to sit on the ground and shouted, “Sit down, we’ll wait for the police.”

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The settlers were subsequently filmed knocking Kharzhanovsky to the ground again.

According to Shoko, Kharzhanovsky lost consciousness several times during the incident but was not taken to a hospital, and instead was arrested alongside Nathaniel.

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Footage appeared to show Kharzhanovsky looking dazed and unable to sit upright as he was checked by a medic.

Police said on Thursday that they had received a report of a clash in the area in which two Israeli citizens were attacked, after which police and IDF troops arrested an Israeli citizen and a foreign national, referring to Kharzhanovsky and Nathaniel. No settlers were reported arrested.

Police said they opened an investigation of the incident and were looking into an alleged attempt to steal weapons. The statement did not elaborate on that allegation.

The statement said that at the request of the police, the activists were released but banned from the West Bank for the remainder of the year.

The incident came alongside a series of attacks by settlers on Israeli activists assisting Palestinians in the West Bank, and amid a surge in settler violence and harassment. Arrests and prosecutions are rare, and critics have accused the government of not doing enough to prevent the attacks.

Earlier this month, masked settlers armed with clubs and stones attacked activists helping Palestinians with the olive harvest in the village of Janta, injuring four people, three of whom were taken to a hospital.

Two Palestinians reported assaulted near Nablus

Separately, Palestinian media outlets reported that two Palestinians were assaulted by settlers near the village of Jamma’in, south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank.

Footage showed the two receiving medical treatment, with one of them bleeding from his face. No further details about the incident were immediately available.

Violence has surged during the annual Palestinian olive harvest. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din said on October 23 that it had documented 672 incidents of settler violence since the harvest began on September 27, including 135 incidents of physical violence, across 194 Palestinian communities.

The group said more than 23 percent of the incidents took place while the IDF was present or involved. The IDF has said it acts to enable the harvest to take place.

Tucker Carlson accuses Huckabee of failing to assist Palestinian-American

Far-right, anti-Israel commentator Tucker Carlson also posted footage Thursday of what he said was a violent settler attack on a Palestinian-American in the central West Bank town of Turmus Ayya earlier this month, claiming that US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was aware of the case and had failed to assist. The town has a large population of US citizens.

“Ambassador Huckabee, this is unreleased video of an American who was beaten almost to death last week by Israeli settlers. You know his name because he came to you for help, but you blew him off. That’s disgraceful. Do your job,” Carlson wrote on X.

Huckabee responded with a lengthy post laying out the attempts by the US Embassy in Jerusalem to get in touch with the Palestinian man’s family, with limited success.

“Tucker Carlson is deranged. He accuses me personally of ignoring a US citizen allegedly attacked in Judea/Samaria by Israelis & says I ‘blew him off.’ Tucker knows how to contact me, but he’d rather make unfounded accusations than get facts,” Huckabee wrote.

Huckabee visited Turmus Ayya in September and called for “severe consequences” for violent settlers, saying that “terror is terror.” During the visit, he met Palestinians affected by settler violence, including families of Palestinian Americans. The town’s mayor said at the time that roughly 80 percent of its approximately 3,000 residents were Palestinian Americans.

Earlier this year, Carlson briefly visited Ben Gurion Airport to interview Huckabee in what became a contentious exchange. Carlson has hosted a range of critics of Israel, as well as antisemites and Holocaust deniers, on his popular talk show.

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