A news television crew was in the Palestinian village of Taysir last Thursday, filming the aftermath of a violent attack by Israeli settlers who had established another illegal outpost in the occupied West Bank, when soldiers came into frame.
what happened next was Caught on camera. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) men detained the journalists, and a soldier grabbed CNN photojournalist Cyril Theophilos and pulled him to the ground.
The day after the footage aired, IDF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani publicly apologized to American channel CNN and vowed a prompt investigation.
By Sunday it was decided Reserve battalion will be pulled Immediately from the West Bank. The deployment was originally scheduled to end at the end of April.
Several hundred soldiers were assigned to a retraining program aimed, in the words of the IDF, at “strengthening their professional and moral foundations”.
No one was arrested. The soldiers involved in strangling and detaining the CNN crew were also not suspended. The IDF said that “command measures” would be adopted at the appropriate time, without specifying what and when.
The reaction is not how the Israeli establishment behaves, especially because it had to do so, because its biggest ally, the US, is where the journalists are from.
What is not unusual is how the soldiers behaved, especially because the battalion was largely part of Netzah Yehuda. For many observers of the Israeli military, this name has a long and troubled history associated with it.
What is Netzah Yehuda?
Netzah Yehuda, or the 97th Battalion, is an infantry unit within the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Its name roughly translates from Hebrew as “Victory of Judah”. It sits within the Kfir Brigade and, for most of its existence, has been deployed in the West Bank, the Palestinian territory which Israel has occupied since 1967.
The battalion was established in 1999 with a specific social mission to provide ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, known as Haredim in Israel, a path to entry into the military. The Haredi community, which adheres to a deeply devout interpretation of Judaism and centers its life around religious study, has historically been largely exempted from military conscription, or mandatory military tenure, in Israel.
This is a highly controversial arrangement, and has caused resentment among the secular and moderately religious Israelis it is required to serve.
The idea behind Netzah Yehuda was to create an entity that accommodated strict religious requirements: gender-segregated grounds, strict observance of Jewish dietary laws (kashrut), and a religious atmosphere. It started with 30 soldiers.
What was the battalion doing in the West Bank?
As of 2009 it had more than 1,000 soldiers and the number has remained stable since then. But its composition changed, as by 2012, the majority of the unit was no longer drawn from the Haredi community. The soldiers came from a separate, overlapping group called Da’ati Leumi, or Religious Zionists.
First, the umbrella conceptual term.
Religious Zionism A movement that combines Orthodox Jewish practice with the nationalist ideology behind the establishment of Israel. The nationalist ideology Zionism is based on the centuries-old belief that God gave the land, comprising Israel and parts of the Middle East and West Asia, to the Jews.
This minor difference between Zionism and religious Zionism is the reason why this battalion of attacking journalists is lined up in so many lines.
The broader movement called Zionism is a political ideology established in the late 19th century that states that the Jewish people are a nation and are entitled to a homeland in the historical Land of Israel.
Its founder, Theodor Herzl, was not religiously observant. Most early Zionists were motivated not primarily by religious scriptures, but by feeling the need for a safe haven from European anti-Semitism, especially after Hitler’s genocide and World War II.
The State of Israel, established in 1948, was his project.
But the Dati Leumi, or religious Zionists, merged this nationalism with Orthodox Jewish faith. Religious Zionists view the expansion of the Jewish state as a divinely ordained process. The practical result is that religious Zionism is the ideological engine behind the “settler movement,” a term for the illegal creation of Jewish communities on occupied Palestinian land.
More conservative IDF soldiers from Jewish communities believe the same.
In taisir incident With a CNN crew last Thursday, soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda Reserve Battalion said on camera that they believe the entire West Bank belongs to the Jewish people.
According to CNN reporting, one soldier freely admitted that the outpost the settlers had established in the village was illegal under Israeli law, yet he expressed confidence that it would eventually be legalized.
It comes as Israel faces increasing scrutiny amid the US-allied war on Iran. Its actions in Lebanon and now the West Bank are also attracting attention. By taking this action against Netzah Yehuda he clearly wants to seem like he is doing something about it.
Who actually works in Netzah Yehuda?
Technically, there is The 97th Battalion or Netzah Yehuda, an active-duty Infantry division of over 1,000 regular soldiers. And this unit is supported by The 941st Battalion or Netzah Israel, which Is reserve component It included most of the former soldiers of the active Netzah Yehuda battalion.
Technically, this reserve component, which has about 700 men, has been suspended after the latest incident with the CNN journalist. The IDF has stated in its defense that it has a high response rate when called for duty.
Overall in Netza Yehuda, at least 60% of soldiers are religious Zionists, according to Israeli news outlet Haaretz.
In fact, within that fundamentalist movement sits an even more extreme subgroup sometimes called Haredal – a Hebrew acronym blending Haredi religiosity with Dati Leumi expansionism – whose members hold maximalist views. They work on the ground with the “Settler Movement,” a network of Jewish communities built on Palestinian lands. Men from this subgroup increasingly became part of the Netzah Yehuda battalion.
And even members of a radical settler group called ‘Hilltop Youth’ are entering the battalion. The group got its name because it consists of radical Israeli Jews who are known for violently establishing outposts on Arab/Muslim Palestinian settlements without Israeli government approval.
a pattern of events
CNN Long before the confrontation drew American attention and some action, Netzah Yehuda had investigated how his troops treated Palestinians.
In 2015, a soldier from the battalion was jailed for nine months after being convicted of administering electric shocks to Palestinian detainees on two separate occasions. Several similar cases involving assault, abuse and murders have been reported in the battalion over the years.
The most internationally reported incidents involved 78-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Assad.
Omar Assad, an American citizen who returned to the West Bank in his later years, was bound, gagged and left in the cold after being detained at a checkpoint by soldiers from this battalion in January 2022. He died of a heart attack. The autopsy revealed that she had been beaten. No soldier was prosecuted.
When the incident sparked outrage in Washington because the man killed was an American citizen, the IDF relocated Netzah Yehuda from the West Bank to the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria, in an apparent effort to reduce the unit’s contact with Palestinians. It was the first time in two decades that the battalion had been moved away from Palestinian territory, CNN reported.
It’s apparently back, and back to its old ways.
Biden wanted to ban Netzah Yehuda
In April 2024, American news outlet Axios reported that the administration of then-President Joe Biden was considering formally sanctioning Netza Yehuda under the US law known as the Leahy Act. The law prohibits the United States from providing military assistance to foreign security entities credibly accused of gross human rights violations.
It would have been a major announcement from Israel’s closest ally, that an IDF unit had crossed the legal and moral line.
The Biden administration eventually backed down after Israel said it had taken internal corrective steps.
Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks that killed approximately 1,200 IDF soldiers and civilians in Israel, members of Netzah Yehuda and its reserve battalion were redeployed to active combat in IDF military operations that in total killed more than 70,000 Palestinians over three years.
By 2024, a CNN investigation found that Netzah Yehuda was also involved in training Israeli ground troops and running operational activities in Gaza.
back and how
The Taysir incident last Thursday brought the battalion back into the global focus. The battalion has not been disbanded. The IDF’s argument is that Netzah Yehuda, whatever its problems, remains the key to integrating religious communities into military service.
But IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir ordered the suspension of the entire battalion, citing a pattern of problematic incidents. The two specific soldiers involved are most likely to face further punishment. One of these soldiers, named Mir, admitted to CNN that the settler outpost was illegal but said it would be legalized “slowly, slowly.”
Israel’s far-right leader and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir criticized the suspension, calling it a “serious mistake that harms our fighters and Israel’s deterrent capability.”
But analysts see an irony in this. Carlo Aldrovandi, assistant professor in international peace studies at Trinity College Dublin, wrote in 2024 that, despite Israel’s claims to run “the world’s most moral army”, it has repeatedly proven “reluctant to dismantle a battalion that appears to function as an independent militia with very little accountability to central command”.
