Photographer beaten by settlers slams Netanyahu for doubting attack: 'Mr. prime minister, maybe take another look at those videos'

Heidi Levine, the Washington Post photographer who was beaten by settlers in the West Bank yesterday, shares her story with Channel 12 news.

Levine says after arriving on the scene, she could see masked men with tzitzit, at which point “everyone started to scatter.”

At that point, she says, she was set upon by a group of men, who she said numbered at least 20.

“They threw me to the ground, and they just started kicking me and beating me with sticks,” she says.

“I’ve had two doctors and a nurse suspect that I was actually stabbed in and near my buttocks area, from maybe a knife,” she says. “Other colleagues have told me that they’ve even seen that the settlers are now tying nails onto their sticks,” she says.

“They broke my cameras off my shoulders. They broke the straps. At one point they stood me up on my feet because they weren’t trying to help me; they were actually trying to rob me further,” she adds.

This photograph, a still from a video clip, appears to show Heidi Levine, a photojournalist with the Washington Post, carried from the scene after being attacked by Israeli settler extremists in the West Bank, October 16, 2026 (Agenzia Fotogramma/ipa-agency.net/Sipa USA via Reuters)

Then, she says, they pushed her back down and continued hitting her.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she says.

She slams the prime minister for suggesting that the settlers were trying to help her up: “That is such a lie and the biggest insult.”

She says the Palestinians were trying to push settlers away, and without them, “I probably would have been dead.”

“Mr. prime minister, maybe take another look at those videos, okay? And really look at those videos with your full attention because you’ll see nobody was trying to help me except for my colleagues,” she says.

“I’m not going to let what happened to me yesterday stop me,” she says.

“I am not going to let these thugs, which I’m sorry to say, are, in my words and in my mind and other people’s minds, literally Jewish terrorists, and they are destroying the whole image for everyone in Israel all over the world,” she says.

“Because when anyone hears the word Israeli or the country Israel, the only thing that comes to their mind is these guys who did what they did to me yesterday, and I have been to so many funerals of people who have been killed by them,” she says.

“They stole my camera, my gear, my documents, but they didn’t steal my commitments,” she says.