Israeli police arrest 10 suspects in the West Bank attacks on an American photojournalist and European diplomats

The arrests came before dawn, and they came after Washington asked for them in public. Israeli police said on Monday that 10 suspects had been arrested in an operation called Olive Leaf, run with the army and the Shin Bet domestic security service, into violent incidents in the occupied West Bank over the weekend. The suspects, whom police did not identify, were taken for questioning on suspicion of involvement in acts of violence, violating a closed military zone order and illegal construction. Army Radio reported that they are Israeli citizens. Police said findings linking them to the incidents were seized and several vehicles confiscated.

The two attacks are the ones this page reported on Sunday. On Friday, dozens of masked settlers, some armed, descended on a Palestinian olive harvest near the village of Abu Falah, hurling stones with slingshots, and beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, 63, who was photographing the harvest. She was treated at the government hospital in Ramallah. On Saturday, settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats visiting Taybeh, a Christian Palestinian town, beating the mayor of a French town with iron bars and damaging a Belgian consular vehicle while Palestinian farmers were assaulted at the harvest. France, Belgium and Poland, whose diplomats were attacked, called on Israel to act, and the United States urged a crackdown and the arrest of those responsible for the attack on the journalist.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who had called the attack on Levine an act of terror and called for arrest and prosecution, welcomed the arrests on X as a very positive development in finding and punishing those who severely attacked and beat Heidi Levine. Superintendent Moshe Pinchi said security forces are working to collect evidence, findings and testimonies and to build the evidentiary record that will enable bringing those involved to justice. A police video of the operation appeared to show slingshots found at one property.

Whether arrests become prosecutions is the open part of the story. Prosecutions of Israeli settlers for violence in the West Bank are rare, Reuters noted, and the harvest season now under way has brought a sharp rise in settler attacks on the Palestinian farmers who depend on it. Ten suspects in custody is the largest single answer the Israeli authorities have given to a weekend that injured an American journalist and a European delegation in the space of two days, as of October 19.