AFP says West Bank settlers attacked its journalists

Israeli settlers in the West Bank attacked AFP journalists reporting on tension with Palestinians, in violence that left at least five people injured, the reporters and medics say.

A three-person team from the international news agency traveled to the village of Jannatah near Bethlehem to report on Israeli activists who conduct solidarity visits with Palestinians facing harassment by extremist settlers, who recently blocked a road in the area.

After an altercation broke out between the settlers and activists, the Israeli military ordered journalists to leave what it called a “closed military zone,” at which point two additional cars full of settlers swooped in, AFP reports.

The settlers, many of them children, threw stones toward the journalists and activists. One AFP journalist ducked a stone but then a child settler struck him in the chin with a stick, causing minor bleeding, he says.

The AFP journalists returned to see their two parked cars both damaged, with back windshields smashed in and tires punctured.

Five people were treated for injuries, the Palestine Red Crescent Society says, with AFP journalists reporting seeing at least one Israeli activist taken in a Palestinian ambulance.