West Bank olive harvest attacks leave a Washington Post photographer hurt

PBS NewsHour's brief report pairs footage from the villages with Heidi Levine's account from a hospital bed.

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PBS NewsHour Story of October 18, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 366,171 views a day, 41 times a normal first day on this channel (8,860).

Israeli settlers attack Palestinians during olive harvest

The harvest came under attack. On Friday, dozens of Israeli settlers set cars and olive trees on fire across the West Bank and went after Palestinians who had gathered to pick the autumn crop. Geoff Bennett reports it for PBS NewsHour in a segment of about a minute and a half.

The field footage is stark. Masked men chase people, vehicles burn, stones fly and fires spread through the groves. The description adds that some attackers carried gas canisters. Health officials said more than a dozen people were injured in at least eight villages.

One of them was Heidi Levine, an American photojournalist with The Washington Post. She was wearing a vest clearly marked "PRESS" when the attackers kicked and beat her, and she had to flee. Speaking from a hospital bed, she called them "monsters" and said they were giving everyone in the country a horrible reputation. The Post said it was outraged by the unwarranted attack on its photographer.

The report closes with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, which condemned the violence but said the facts of the confrontation remained unclear and under investigation.

The Short reached nearly a quarter of a million views in its first 12 hours. The channel's Shorts usually draw fewer than 9,000 in a whole first day. It was a heavy news day for PBS NewsHour more broadly: the Friday politics conversation with Jonathan Capehart and Matthew Continetti, about a White House press secretary who left after five days, also drew far more viewers than the program's longer videos usually do.

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