NBC News international correspondent Matt Bradley is speaking out after he was physically attacked while on assignment overseas.
“We’ve been covering settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank for years. But yesterday, we found ourselves on the menu,” Bradley wrote via Instagram on Sunday, August 30. “A group of masked settlers beat our team and pummeled the 51-year-old woman we were interviewing unconscious.”
While the journalist told his followers that everyone is now OK, “this is just one incident among an unprecedented surge in settler violence across the West Bank.”
During a report on NBC’s Sunday Today, Bradley shared video footage of the moment masked young men — in a gray vehicle featuring an Israeli license plate — armed with sticks and stones rushed to the scene.
According to Bradley, the unidentified individuals smashed their car windshield, hit the crew members with clubs and beat a Palestinian woman — an interview subject — named Aida Ahmed Abdalla until she was rendered unconscious.
“I’m safe. I’m recovering. I got hit twice on the arm,” Bradley told anchor Willie Geist. “Actually, every member of my team, including the producer, the cameramen and one of the drivers we were with, they all took hits, but we’re all recovering well.” (Abdalla is also recovering and has since been discharged from a local hospital.)
Geist described it as a “truly appalling attack” before expressing gratitude for the safety of his colleagues.
“Matt, I am glad you’re safe after what we should warn our viewers was an incredibly disturbing incident,” he said.
In an interview with NBC News, producer Lawahez Jabari hinted that the incident could have been much worse.
“Suddenly a car came to us,” she said after receiving medical care. “The settlers had sticks. I saw a gun, but they didn’t use the gun.”
Camera operator Khaldoon Eid, who lives in the West Bank, added, “We didn’t expect that — that they would come to attack. We were in the middle of a Palestinian area next to Palestinian houses.”
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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his spokesman condemned the violence against the NBC News crew and other incidents across the area over the weekend.
Netanyahu said the “criminal acts of violence committed in the villages of Kosra and Jalud by a handful of rioters who violate the law, cause enormous injustice to the law-abiding settler public, hinder the IDF in fulfilling its missions and harm Israel’s standing in the world.”
Bradley has several years of experience covering conflict in the Middle East. Before joining NBC News, Bradley reported on Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq for the Wall Street Journal.
