The punishment for documenting injustice in the West Bank: a brutal attack by settlers
Issam Rimawi at home in El Bireh, June 2025
Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 13 June 2025:
His head is bandaged, concealing the stitches, bandages cover his fractured arm and he has to use a cane to move around due to ongoing spells of dizziness. Issam Rimawi is a war photographer who has been covering the occupation in the West Bank for years. He took a one-month course in self-defense, but nothing prepared him for the brutal attack he suffered at the hand of settlers two weeks ago.
During a conversation in his elegant home in a modern apartment building in El Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, he tells us he will go back to photographing again – only he’ll be more cautious and vigilant. In the course in Ankara he was sent to a few years ago by the Turkish news agency Anadolu, his employer, he was taught that in an emergency, the camera and the photo should be of the lowest priority, the main thing is to see to one’s personal safety.
On May 27, settlers stole one of his cameras and smashed another one, but he’s determined to go back to documenting them and the army in a few weeks’ time, after he recovers from the beating he took.
A swift, silent elevator carried us to Rimawi’s apartment. At 41, he’s the father of four children and has worked as a press photographer for almost 20 years. A good-looking, smiling man, he’s married to Dima, a 38-year-old teacher.
A rich assortment of refreshments awaits the guests – we visited last Monday, the fourth and final day of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. In addition to the Turkish agency, Rimawi also works for the Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida. His debut assignment there was covering Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s funeral, in November 2004.
Since then, he has witnessed and documented life around the entire West Bank. He’s been wounded 13 times, usually lightly, though more seriously one time when an Israel Defense Forces soldier fired a rubber-coated bullet at him from close range, even though he was wearing the requisite press vest and protective helmet, as he always does in the field.
That incident occurred six years ago in the village of Ras Karkar, near the settlement of Dolev, west of El-Bireh. He’s convinced he was shot because he was identified as a journalist. The area was quiet at the time. He accompanies his story by showing us stills and video clips: He is seen writhing in pain after the projectile struck his leg.
Much has changed since the war in the Gaza Strip started, he relates, before we get to the incident in which the settlers attacked him. In his view, things had undergone a sea change even before October 7, with the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who worked for Al Jazeera, by IDF soldiers in Jenin. As it happened on that day, May 11, 2022, he was on his way to Ramallah to work.
“After Shireen was killed, we realized that the protective vest and the helmet of the journalists would no longer be enough to protect us. I did a great deal of work in Jenin, I was with Shireen a lot,” he recalls. “After she was killed, we became more cautious, giving more thought before going out to cover every event.
“Until that point we could get close to the soldiers – we weren’t afraid and we thought that if the soldiers realized we were journalists, that would reduce the danger. Since Shireen was killed, and even more since the war broke out, there is no longer any difference between us and other Palestinians. Everything has turned 180 degrees around in terms of the soldiers’ attitude toward journalists.”
A media warhorse, perennially clad in vest and helmet, he was in the Jenin refugee camp during the IDF’s Operation House and Garden in July 2023; a year later he documented the large-scale Operation Summer Camps in the West Bank, not returning home for two weeks. In one incident his vest was singed when a soldier fired a tear-gas canister at him – he shows us the photos.
Journalists are less mobile these days in the West Bank. Rimawi no longer visits Hebron, because getting there can take hours with all the relatively new checkpoints; getting to Jenin takes four hours instead of the pre-war two. At night he doesn’t go out to work at all now; it’s too dangerous. He’s afraid the soldiers will mistakenly think his camera is a weapon.
On the morning of May 27 he got a call to cover the start of the wheat harvest in the fields of al-Mughayyir and Abu Falah, two neighboring villages not far from the Shiloh Valley, between Nablus and Ramallah, a hub of violent settlers. The previous night, settlers had set ablaze several fields of wheat, covering about two dunams (half an acre), and the Palestinians hoped to harvest the remainder of their crop under the protective eye of the media before it too went up in flames.
Rimawi shows the first shots he took – an endless stretch of wheat, idyllic images of harvesters on tractors and combines, hoisting bales onto carts. Nine o’clock is written on the photos, which was when he arrived in the fields. There were a few dozen farmers and five journalists, out to document the harvest.
On the hill above, overlooking them and boding ill, were the shacks of new settler outposts. After a time the work was finished and the farmers hurried to take their harvest away and to move on to another plot, about a kilometer away, the journalists in tow.
As soon as they arrived, Rimawi spotted, thanks to his zoom lens, a line of about 10 settlers descending the hill. He retreated to his car, which he had parked some distance away to be on the safe side. Some of the farmers revved up the engines of their tractors and vanished immediately, fearful of a potential pogrom.
Rimawi says he stayed quite far away from the approaching settlers and took photos with a telescopic lens. The settlers started to throw stones at the farmers who were still in the field, and they responded in kind. All the settlers were masked, and they carried clubs and containers of fuel. They didn’t have weapons. Rimawi believes they were youths of 15 or 16 years of age.
The intruders then began to set fire to the fields. Three soldiers – two men and a woman – arrived from the direction of the outpost, and three military vehicles sped in from the road. The soldiers fired tear gas to scatter both the interlopers and the farmers alike. The villagers started to withdraw toward Abu Falah, the settlers toward the road, hiding between olive trees. It looked as though the incident was about to end, the photographer says.
Arriving at his car, which was about 2 kilometers away, Rimawi opened the trunk to put in the vest and helmet. Suddenly four settlers took him by surprise from the rear. Two of them wielded clubs, the others carried rocks. Then two more showed up.
Rimawi shouted, “I am press!” but one of the settlers with a club swung it at his head. Rimawi, a hefty fellow, raised his arm to block the blow. The club crashed onto his left arm, fracturing it. His Apple watch was also shattered; he shows us the smashed device. He tried to repulse the assailants physically, but to no avail. Then a rock struck him on the head from behind.
That’s all he remembers. Eyewitnesses told Rimawi later that he collapsed to the ground, and that the settlers went on beating him as he lay there unconscious. A video shows him lying there, motionless, with some farmers who rushed to the spot trying to lift him up, his body limp, head dangling.
Afterward he would discover that the settlers snatched the two cameras he had been holding. One they smashed and left at the scene, the other vanished. His phone, which had been in his pocket, was also shattered, probably by the blows to his legs with the clubs as he lay on the ground.
When he came to, he found himself in the medical clinic in the town of Turmus Ayya. In a daze, he asked those in the room if they were Jews or Arabs – he was afraid the settlers had kidnapped him, he says – and whether his car had been torched. He explains now that he was worried about the car because settlers had burned 30 Palestinian vehicles in the area a few months earlier.
It turned out that Rimawi had been evacuated to the clinic in his own car – the farmers found the keys in his pocket – according to Muhammad Rumana, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. A Palestinian ambulance took him from the clinic to the Ramallah Governmental Hospital.
The physicians say the photographer was unconscious for about three hours after he was brought in. He himself remembers being attacked at about noon and waking up in the hospital at 5 P.M. Imaging tests continued then and in the following days, out of a concern that bleeding was liable to occur in the brain. He was found to have suffered a concussion, a skull fracture and a fracture in one arm. He got 10 stitches in his head and was hospitalized for 10 days. Fortunately he suffered no brain damage, but he’s suffered from dizzy spells since the incident. He’s sure the assailants left him for dead and then hurried off without setting his car on fire.
A complaint to the police?
“There’s no point,” he says.
This article is reproduced in its entirety