WASHINGTON — The United States wants Israel to do more to deter attacks by settlers in the occupied West Bank, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday, after video spread of an attack on an American photojournalist covering the Palestinian olive harvest, according to Reuters.
“We’re very disturbed by those images and what we’re seeing,” Rubio told reporters. “We’ve asked the Israelis and continue to ask them to crack down on that stuff.” He said the Trump administration does not want to see friction or a new crisis in the West Bank, and that Washington would communicate its expectations to Israeli officials.
The comments followed the widespread dissemination of video showing multiple individuals attacking Heidi Levine, an American photojournalist with The Washington Post. Levine was one of at least two people injured in the Friday incident near Abu Falah, which took place as Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian civilians during the annual harvest, according to Reuters.
Levine has said she believed she might not have survived the attack had she not been wearing a flak jacket and helmet, describing attackers who kept kicking her as she tried to protect herself and her equipment. European diplomats and a French mayor were also attacked in the occupied West Bank, Belgium’s foreign minister said, making Friday’s violence a diplomatic incident for several governments at once, not only a press-freedom case.
Rubio said the State Department has inquired about the event that included Levine’s attack, and that he expected to hear back from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem by Sunday. He said he had not yet received an official briefing when he spoke, and described the images he had seen as not looking good.
Background: Friday’s attacks came during the annual olive harvest, the season when Palestinian families and the volunteers and journalists who accompany them are most exposed in groves close to settlements. Zark News reported on Saturday that settlers torched a mosque and attacked olive harvesters in the West Bank, with Levine among the injured. According to Yesh Din, an Israeli settlements monitoring group, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been involved in at least 170 attacks on Palestinians since September 27, around the start of this year’s harvest.
The harvest attacks have become a recurring test of Israeli enforcement in the territory. Palestinian officials and rights groups say attackers are rarely prosecuted; successive U.S. administrations have pressed Israel to act, with limited public evidence of sustained enforcement. Rubio’s remarks are notable because they were made publicly, on the record, and tied to a specific request rather than a general call for calm.
Why it matters: Washington is Israel’s principal military and diplomatic backer, and public pressure from its secretary of state carries a different weight from statements by European governments, several of whose nationals were also attacked on Friday. Whether Israel announces arrests, charges or new enforcement measures in the coming days will indicate how far that pressure reaches.
What happens next: the State Department is awaiting the embassy’s account by Sunday, and Israeli authorities have yet to announce detentions in connection with the Levine attack in the reporting available so far. Harvest work continues across the West Bank for several more weeks, which means the conditions that produced Friday’s violence remain in place.
Source: Reuters reporting, October 17, 2026.
