A crowd of masked settlers attacked Heidi Levine in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah, north of Ramallah, on Friday. Levine, who has lived in Israel for 40 years, suffered four fractured vertebrae, two broken ribs, and four puncture wounds during the beating.
The 64-year-old woman was beaten likely more than 100 times while she was covering the olive harvest. Settlers robbed Levine of a camera bag containing two lenses, a camera disk, a credit card, an American passport, and a pouch of documents.
Jasper Nathaniel reached Levine to help her to safety during the incident. Levine was discharged from a hospital in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva on Wednesday.
Levine described the scene as a biblical battle, noting that Palestinian youths used slingshots to aim stones at the settlers to create a protective shield. The victim stated, "I probably would have been dead, because for sure it doesn’t take much to kill a person with blows to the head."
Israeli police arrested 10 suspects following the Abu Salah incident, and additional suspects were detained after a separate attack on European diplomats near Taybeh on Saturday. US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called the attack a “despicable act of terror.”
Levine expressed that her confidence in her attackers being brought to justice is 2 out of 10. More than 20 Palestinians had been killed in settler attacks so far this year.
