WaPo freelance photojournalist Heidi Levine’s account of a prolonged, near-lethal beating does not hold up against the fuller visual record.
It aligns only to the one-sided media framing published by her own newspaper (see clip below), which showed her surrounded by a group of men. We are to infer that they beat her mercilessly.
Levine’s description of the incident is certainly quite extreme:
1) Claim That The Assault Was Brutal
“When they came running down… I was attacked, pushed to the ground. Luckily I had my flak jacket and my helmet. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t even be here, because they just kept kicking me… like probably 50 times.”
2) Claim That the Assault Was Continuous
“And then after like 10 minutes… they like tried to get me to stand up and then they to push me down again and continued to kick me and I was trying to hold on to my cameras and my pouch and I had my phone on a string on my neck that they eventually just broke everything off of me and continued kicking me.”
3) Claim that Palestinians Rescued Her
“And then the next thing I noticed is I was getting evacuated by my Palestinian colleagues and… medical service that rushed me in an ambulance.”
4) Characterization of Settlers Who Took Her Camera
“I don’t know how a parent could raise such monsters.”
CNN reported that “Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank attacked her and a group of Palestinians during the annual olive harvest.”
Yet Iranian Quds channel footage posted on Instagram shows Palestinians advancing aggressively toward the settlers and depicts that violence as victorious resistance.
Interestingly, a person wearing a press vest and blue shirt, walking slowly, is embedded with that advancing group.
The Judea & Samaria Situation Room published footage of the settlers helping Levine sit up.
The Post has offered no follow-up on this footage, no correction, and no acknowledgment that their photographer was present among the side initiating or participating in the confrontation.
The coverage remained one-sided even after that material surfaced.
Meanwhile the President of Israel, the U.S. Ambassador, and the head of the settlers’ council all publicly fell into line with condemnations.
But the story Levine told—and that major outlets amplified—still does not match the visual sequence: settlers seizing her camera after she lagged behind the group she was embedded with, then helping her up, with no continuous footage of a ten-minute, fifty-kick assault after she was already on the ground.
In short, contact and the theft of equipment occurred.
The dramatic, extended “lynching by monsters” narrative she delivered, and that WaPo and others promoted, does not hold up once the fuller record is examined.
