The United States has told Israel to crack down on settler violence in the occupied West Bank, after masked men attacked a delegation of European diplomats and a Washington Post photojournalist in two separate assaults over the weekend.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington was “very disturbed” by images of the attacks. “We’ve asked the Israelis and continue to ask them to crack down on that stuff,” he told reporters on Saturday, before boarding a flight to Central Asia, adding that he expected to hear back from the American embassy in Jerusalem by Sunday.
A French mayor beaten in the olive groves
The most diplomatically explosive incident came on Saturday in Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian village east of Ramallah, where a delegation including Belgium’s consul general, French and Polish diplomats and Catholic representatives was visiting farmers during the annual olive harvest. According to reports, masked men wielding iron bars charged the group, beat a Palestinian teenager, pushed an elderly woman and smashed the windows of a marked Belgian diplomatic vehicle.
The visiting mayor of the northern French town of Aulnoye-Aymeries, Bernard Baudoux, said he was repeatedly struck and thrown to the ground despite wearing his official tricolour mayoral sash. “It’s the gratuitous nature of the violence that stuns me,” he told reporters. “They arrived completely enraged.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot demanded the attackers be arrested; Belgium’s foreign minister pledged to press for further European Union sanctions.
A harvest under siege — and an election approaching
A day earlier, Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was attacked near Abu Falah while covering the harvest. She was seriously injured — reportedly with a nearly detached finger, a broken rib and a broken vertebra — and the State Department said it was “greatly concerned” about the injuries to an American citizen. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called for “a full investigation, arrest, and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”
The attacks land at an awkward moment for Washington, which is juggling an already crowded foreign-policy in-tray alongside Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the wider Iran conflict — officials say they do not want a fresh crisis in the West Bank. Israel, meanwhile, is weeks from elections, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu courting his pro-settlement base. Monitoring groups say settlers have carried out at least 170 attacks on Palestinians since the harvest began in late September.
