Israel punishes a military unit that assaulted a CNN crew in the West Bank

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military has suspended a battalion whose soldiers assaulted a CNN crew in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in a rare case of punishment for soldier misconduct.

The army announced Monday it was suspending the Netzah Yehuda battalion after soldiers were filmed assaulting the CNN crew last week.

Netzah Yehuda is a unit of ultra-Orthodox soldiers that has been linked to abuses of Palestinian civilians in the past, including the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian American man after his detention by the battalion’s forces in 2022.

After an outcry from the U.S. government in that case, the Israeli military called the incident “a grave and unfortunate event," reprimanded one officer and reassigned two others. Later that year, Israel moved the unit out of the West Bank.

In last week’s incident, a CNN team was preparing a report on settler violence in the West Bank village of Tayasir. Settler violence in the territory has surged, with at least nine Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers this year, according to U.N. data. Punishment of Israeli settlers for violence against Palestinians is also rare.

ln the incident caught on camera, soldiers from the battalion approached the news crew, guns raised, and yelled at them. Correspondent Jeremy Diamond said a producer was put in a chokehold. The footage went viral.

In a report on CNN’s website, Diamond wrote that the soldiers detained the crew, along with West Bank Palestinians, for two hours while echoing settler ideology, saying all the West Bank belongs to Israel and calling Palestinians terrorists.

On Monday, the military said that Netzah Yehuda was suspended from its current deployment and the battalion would resume its service after undergoing “a process aimed at reinforcing its professional and ethical foundations.”

Rabbi Shaul Abdiel, who works with the Netzah Yehuda unit, criticized the Israeli military’s punishment, saying in a radio interview that it was “too fast and too collective.”

Human rights groups long have argued that Israel rarely holds soldiers accountable for Palestinian deaths. The cases of the Palestinian American man and CNN crew appear to have attracted extra attention because they involved U.S. citizens and a well-known news organization.

A few weeks before the CNN incident, Israeli authorities said they had launched an investigation into the killing of four Palestinians, including two children, one of them blind, by Israeli forces during a patrol in the nearby West Bank town of Tammun.

Israeli authorities have not announced disciplinary measures against the officers in that case. Israeli media has reported that the officers have not been questioned.