A CNN crew led by Jeremy Diamond was stopped and detained by a group of IDF soldiers this week, and one photojournalist was put into a chokehold, the news organization reported Saturday. Diamond and the crew were reporting on rising violence in the West Bank.
In video shared by CNN, soldiers show up at the Palestinian city of Tayasir and told the crew, “Stop! Sit down! Sit down!”
“Seventy-three seconds later, one of the soldiers came up from behind CNN photojournalist Cyril Theophilos and put him in a chokehold, bringing him to the ground and damaging his camera,” Diamond wrote.
Diamond, his crew, and “several Palestinians in the area” spent two hours detained by the soliders.
“The two hours we spent detained by them laid bare the settler ideology motivating many of the soldiers who operate in the occupied West Bank – and the ways in which soldiers frequently act in service of the settler movement,” he said. “Their comments build on a large body of evidence documented by journalists, activists and Palestinians that show Israeli soldiers supporting or standing idly by as Israeli settlers attack Palestinians or encroach on their land.”
Diamond also wrote that a solider named Meir said the Israeli settlement he was protecting was illegal, but that this would change. “But this will be a legal settlement,” Diamond insisted Meir said. “Slowly, slowly.”
Meir and another soldier also “repeatedly declared that all of the West Bank belongs to Israel and the Jewish people, echoing the language of far-right government ministers.”
Diamond also asked Meir if it was typical for soldiers to exact revenge, to which he answered, “Listen, at the end of the day, if the state doesn’t address what they did – those who murdered the youth … what do you expect us to do?”
