Masked Israeli settlers attacked foreign nationals in the occupied West Bank on two consecutive days. On Friday 16 October they beat Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine in Abu Falah. On Saturday 17 October they assaulted a French mayor and attacked a delegation of European diplomats and Catholic clergy in Taybeh. Both villages lie north-east of Ramallah. Video, photographs and the accounts of named witnesses document both attacks, and Israel's military confirmed the attack in Taybeh within hours. Israeli police had announced no arrest in either case by the end of Sunday 18 October.
Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot said settlers in Taybeh had targeted Belgium's consul general in Jerusalem, French and Polish diplomats and Catholic representatives. He said Belgium would keep pressing for EU sanctions against those responsible for settler violence and those who support them. The EU's foreign policy spokesperson said on Sunday that the bloc expected "full accountability".
Abu Falah, 16 October
About 80 settlers, some carrying gas canisters and slings, came down from a hill above a terraced grove where Abu Falah families were picking olives on Friday morning, Reuters witnesses said. The settlers set trees alight and threw stones at the harvesters, and at least one armed settler opened fire.
Levine, a USian photojournalist who has covered conflicts across the Middle East for decades, was wearing a helmet and a vest marked press. She told AFP from hospital in Ramallah that she saw more than 50 masked men carrying wooden sticks and what she believed were iron bars. She told the Committee to Protect Journalists the attackers knocked her down and kicked her for at least 10 minutes after she identified herself as a journalist, then took her cameras and phone.
Levine told the Israeli news site Walla that Israeli soldiers fired tear gas, the harvesters scattered and about 15 men then beat her while soldiers watched. "Fifteen people are beating a woman. Why didn't they help me?" she said. Witnesses told the Washington Post that soldiers did not intervene as settlers attacked Palestinians and journalists. Levine said Palestinian colleagues pushed the attackers back and got her to an ambulance.
Video filmed at the scene and circulated by the Foreign Press Association shows masked men surrounding Levine, pushing her to the ground and beating her. Levine told Israel's Channel 12 from her hospital bed: "I didn't think I was going to make it."
Levine had surgery on her left hand on Saturday at Rabin Medical Center, which said she was in moderate condition. Her daughter, Ashley Milner, told the Associated Press that one finger had been cut to the bone with the tendon exposed. Milner said her mother had also suffered a broken rib, fractures to several vertebrae and cuts across her body, and that the injury to her hand could end her career.
Settlers beat AFP photographer Jaafar Ashtiyeh, 58, near Aqraba, south-east of Nablus, on 6 October while he covered the same harvest, leaving him in hospital with head and torso injuries. The Committee to Protect Journalists has reviewed at least 16 incidents in the West Bank in 2026 involving at least 35 local and international journalists.
Taybeh, 17 October
Taybeh is the last entirely Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank. On Saturday a delegation that included Belgium's consul general, French and Polish diplomats, Archbishop Vincent Dollmann of Cambrai and Bernard Baudoux, the 78-year-old mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries in northern France, was visiting the village during the olive harvest.
Shortly after 13:00 the group was warned that settlers had attacked Palestinians harvesting olives nearby, according to the Guardian, which had a reporter in Taybeh and filmed the moments before the attack. The delegation began to leave in its vehicles. Army Radio reported that about seven masked settlers arrived on all-terrain vehicles, surrounded a diplomatic car and demanded identity documents. They smashed a window of a Belgian consulate vehicle.
Baudoux was wearing his tricolour mayoral sash. Eyewitnesses told the Guardian that one attacker shouted "France, France" before pushing him to the ground. A diplomat travelling with the delegation told ynet that the settlers kicked Baudoux and shouted "Viva la France" after beating him. Metadata from the Guardian's footage shows 22 seconds between the last frame of Baudoux arguing with the attackers and activists' footage of him slumped against a car.
Amit Orfali, an Israeli activist with the Torat Tzedek organisation who was with the harvesters, said the settlers carried clubs, surrounded the vehicles, beat them and threatened to kill those inside. Orfali said the diplomats and activists fled back into the village with two Palestinians who had been unable to get away. Orfali and fellow activist Roni Federman filmed the attack, and photographs show Baudoux on the ground and the shattered consulate window. Israel's military said no soldiers were at the scene.
Two Israeli accounts
Israel's military confirmed the attack on Saturday and condemned it as a severe act of violence by Israeli rioters. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar used the same term and said his ministry was in contact with the ambassadors concerned. Both said the visit had not been coordinated with the military.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office issued a statement later on Saturday headed "ALLEGED ATTACK ON EUROPEAN DIPLOMATS". It said "serious accusations require serious evidence", that published footage did not establish the full sequence of events or individual responsibility, and that the delegation had entered a sensitive area without prior coordination. It also warned of a coordinated campaign to smear Israel. The Times of Israel reported that Netanyahu said there was no compelling evidence that settlers had attacked the diplomats.
Delegation members told ynet that Taybeh lies in Area B, that visits there require no military coordination and that diplomats travel there often without an escort. One diplomat told ynet that Netanyahu's statement ignored the fact that the delegation was visiting a Christian village from Catholic countries.
Netanyahu's office said on Friday that the facts of the Abu Falah confrontation, in which Levine "was allegedly assaulted", remained unclear, and that footage appeared to show her knocked down and helped to her feet by the same unidentified person. Levine told Channel 12 that the suggestion was "such a lie and the biggest insult". She said the attackers stood her up only to rob her further, and that nobody except her colleagues tried to help her.
President Isaac Herzog apologised to Levine, according to Haaretz, and called for law enforcement to act "with an iron hand".
The police investigation
Israeli police said the Binyamin station opened an investigation into the Taybeh attack after footage spread online. Police and forensic investigators entered the scene under military escort on Saturday to collect evidence and take testimony, the Israeli outlet Jfeed reported.
Maj. Gen. Moshe Pinchi, the police West Bank District commander, is personally overseeing both investigations and has assigned them to the district's central investigative unit working with the Shin Bet, police sources told ynet. Police said Shin Bet officers were also working to identify the men who beat Levine.
Police sources told ynet on Sunday that, as of Saturday evening, the French, Belgian and Polish missions had not supplied detailed testimony, video, access to their vehicles or permission to collect forensic evidence. Police routed those requests through Israel's Foreign Ministry. The complaint covered the first hours after the attack, and the attack itself had been filmed by Israeli activists and witnessed by a Guardian reporter.
Diplomatic agents are not obliged to give evidence as witnesses under Article 31 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Consular officers are not obliged to give evidence about matters connected with their functions under Article 44 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Whether to hand over testimony or give access to consular vehicles is a decision for the Belgian, French and Polish governments, and none had said publicly by Sunday whether it had done so.
One diplomat at the scene told ynet the attackers were seven men aged 20 or older who appeared to have come from farther away than the nearest outpost and to have been called in for the attack. No other published account has addressed where the attackers came from.
A record of impunity
The UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported in June that Israeli authorities are directly involved in settler attacks through funding and military support. It found that settler violence serves as a means of carrying out Israeli state policy and that the authorities grant settlers impunity from prosecution. The commission counted at least seven Palestinians killed and 832 injured by settlers in 2025, a 130 per cent rise on 2024.
Police reported seven arrests after a settler attack on Khirbet Humsa, which the commission examined. The commission said it knew of no investigative or judicial outcome.
Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group, monitored 1,664 police investigations into settler offences against Palestinians from 2005 to September 2023. Of the 1,615 concluded, 93.7 per cent were closed without indictment and 50 ended in a conviction. Police gave reasons for 1,437 closures. In 64 per cent of those the offender was recorded as unknown, and in 20 per cent the evidence was insufficient, failures Yesh Din attributed to the police.
Activist and teacher Awdah Hathaleen was shot dead in Umm al-Khair, in Masafer Yatta, on the night of 28 July 2025. Footage obtained by the AP shows settler Yinon Levi waving a pistol and firing shots during the confrontation, though it does not show where the bullets struck. Police detained Levi, and a court refused their request to extend his detention and released him to house arrest the next day, the AP reported. The Biden administration had sanctioned Levi, and the Trump administration lifted those sanctions. The EU, the UK and Canada still list him.
A US Senate resolution led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, defeated 47 to 51 on 29 September, stated that no one has been convicted for the death of any Palestinian civilian killed by settlers in the West Bank since 2020.
Taybeh and the harvest
Settlers set fire near Taybeh's ancient Byzantine church in July 2025 and torched cars and sprayed threatening graffiti in the village in a pre-dawn attack on 28 July 2025. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, visited that month and called the attack on the church and cemetery an act of terrorism. Settlers obstructed Palestinian firefighters tackling a large blaze near Taybeh in June 2026, according to Palestinian civil defence and a local priest. Israel's military declared the village a closed military zone to non-resident Israelis on 9 August 2026, citing violent attacks by Israelis in the area.
Settlers carried out nearly 200 attacks causing casualties or property damage during this year's olive harvest by 15 October, more than the 185 recorded across the whole 2025 season, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. OCHA counted one Palestinian killed, more than 120 people injured and more than 2,500 olive trees and saplings damaged, with about 80 per cent of the incidents in the previous fortnight. The Palestinian Health Ministry put the harvest toll at no fewer than four killed and more than 100 injured, without a breakdown by perpetrator.
Witnesses said settlers killed Ali Hassan Yasser al-Bazzari, 44, near Burqa, north-west of Nablus, on 7 October. Yesh Din has counted at least 170 settler attacks on Palestinians since 27 September, Reuters reported. On the day of the Taybeh attack, settler gunfire injured two Palestinians in Deir Ammar, and the Palestine Red Crescent Society said four women and a child were injured in Ma'in, in Masafer Yatta. Reuters saw at least 10 masked settlers throwing rocks at Palestinians and activists near Salfit on Sunday.
International response
Prévot tied the Taybeh attack to Israel's settlement policy, which he called illegal. He said Israel as the occupying power must protect Palestinians, diplomats and journalists. "Impunity for violent settlers must end," he said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Baudoux had been violently assaulted by extremist settlers and demanded that Israeli authorities arrest and prosecute those responsible. Baudoux told AFP the attack suggested "there is a tolerance on the part of the Israeli government" towards settler violence.
Poland's foreign ministry said its diplomats were unhurt. Spokesman Maciej Wewiór said preliminary information pointed to Israeli settlers, and the ministry demanded urgent and detailed explanations, identification of those responsible and their prosecution. A ministry statement reported by CBS News said there was no indication the Polish representatives had been singled out.
The EU's foreign policy spokesperson said on Sunday that the bloc strongly condemned attacks by violent settlers, including on European diplomats, and called for effective measures to prevent further violence during the harvest. EU sanctions require the agreement of all 27 member states. Ministers agreed the latest settler listings in May only after Hungary's new government dropped its veto, and discussed settler violence again at the Foreign Affairs Council on 12 October. No date had been set by Sunday for ministers to take up Belgium's call for further measures.
Riley Barnes, the US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, and Brian Burch, the US ambassador to the Holy See, visited Taybeh on Sunday with other diplomats, Reuters reported. They went to the village's Latin Convent church and were expected to meet members of the Christian community. Huckabee wrote on X that those who attacked Levine should be jailed, and he attended a settler conference in the West Bank on Sunday, Reuters reported. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration had asked Israeli authorities to crack down on settler violence. "We're very disturbed by those images," he said.
Palestinian residents of the West Bank are protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention, whose Article 27 entitles them to protection against all acts of violence. Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Regulations requires an occupying power to restore and ensure public order and safety. The International Court of Justice said in an advisory opinion on 19 July 2024 that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel must cease new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers.
Israeli police had announced no arrest by the end of Sunday 18 October in either attack. By then it was more than 48 hours since the Abu Falah beating and more than 30 hours since the attack in Taybeh. Video of both attacks was public, a Guardian reporter had witnessed the second, and the Shin Bet had been assigned to both cases.
