Armed Israeli Settlers Kidnap British Activist

Armed Israeli settlers kidnapped a British activist in the illegally occupied West Bank on Saturday, before locking him in a shed and then handing him over to police, his lawyer said. 

Finn Joughin, 22, was trying to prevent settlers from dismantling a fence in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair when two men dragged him away, video of the incident shows. 

He was handed over to police but not charged with a crime, and was due to be deported on Sunday.   

“Without any hearing, the police have decided to move him to deportation, which just shows that this entire case has been political in the first place,” Joughin’s lawyer, Inbar Shaked Vard, told the Associated Press. “The only intention of police was to deport international activists who come to Israel in order to assist Palestinians.” 

She added: “He merely stood by the fence that the settlers were trying to dismantle, in order to prevent them from doing so. He was then kidnapped by armed men, who were not in uniform and therefore did not have authority to do so.”

The UK Foreign Office said it had raised the case with Israeli authorities. 

The incident happened amid a spike in violence by settlers and security forces against foreign observers in the West Bank over the weekend. 

Masked Israelis attacked three members of an NBC News crew as they interviewed a Palestinian woman in the town of Jalud on Saturday. Four men emerged from a car, beat the crew and the woman with sticks and threw rocks at them, the outlet reported.  

Reporter Matt Bradley received treatment at a nearby clinic after being hit twice on the arm. The woman, 51-year-old Aida Ahmed Abdullah, received medical care from the Red Crescent. 

In Hebron, video showed soldiers shouting and pointing their guns at unarmed Palestinians before shoving two journalists wearing press vests and ordering them to move back.

In the footage, journalist Andrey Khrzhanovskiy asks one of the soldiers: “Why did you just aim your rifle at children? You just aimed your rifle at a child.” 

Settlers and soldiers have killed at least 1,122 people, including 235 children, in the West Bank since October 2023 as part of an intensifying campaign of ethnic cleansing that has largely been overshadowed by the genocide in Gaza.