The West Bank in Focus

A recent wave of coverage has drawn attention to settler violence—and forced the Israeli government to talk about it.

In March, in the West Bank village of Tayasir, Jeremy Diamond, CNN’s Jerusalem correspondent, headed out with his news crew to report on the savage beating of a seventy-five-year-old Palestinian man named Abdullah Daraghmeh. The day before, in the course of establishing an illegal outpost, settlers looking to intimidate the locals had entered Daraghmeh’s home in the middle of the night and attacked. As the CNN crew walked around Tayasir speaking with the residents, “out of nowhere,” Diamond told me, “Israeli soldiers show up, pointing their rifles at us, shouting commands, telling us to sit down.” One soldier approached Cyril Theophilos, a CNN cameraman, put him in a choke hold, and forced him to the ground. Later, while reviewing the footage, Diamond told me he was struck by the timing. “From the moment when the soldiers first showed up, to when they assaulted my cameraman, it’s seventy-two seconds. That’s how quickly things escalated.”