Settlers attack an AFP team near Bethlehem; five are treated
The three journalists had gone to the village of Jannatah to cover solidarity visits by Israeli activists, and the army ordered them out as a closed military zone before a second group of settlers arrived and threw stones.
Israeli settlers attacked a three-person news team from Agence France-Presse on Tuesday in the village of Jannatah near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, and the Palestine Red Crescent Society said five people were treated for injuries.
The team had travelled to Jannatah to report on Israeli activists who have been visiting Palestinians facing harassment from settlers, after settlers blocked a road used by people from the village.
An altercation broke out between the settlers and the activists. The Israeli military then ordered the journalists out of an area it declared a "closed military zone", and two further vehicles carrying settlers arrived shortly afterwards. The settlers, many of them children, threw stones towards the journalists and the activists.
One of the journalists said he dodged a stone and was then struck on the chin with a stick by a settler child, drawing blood. The team returned afterwards to where it had parked to find the rear windshields of both vehicles smashed and the tyres punctured. The journalists said they saw at least one Israeli activist carried away in a Palestinian ambulance.
The order in which those things happened is the part worth holding on to. The journalists were told to leave before the second group of settlers turned up, so the closed-zone declaration removed the people who were recording the scene rather than the people who went on to attack it. Such an order is lawful on its face and applies to whoever is standing in the area, which in practice means the cameras go first.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank alongside around three million Palestinians, on land held under military occupation since 1967. Settlement construction is still being advanced ahead of Israeli parliamentary elections due on 27 October.