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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

According to him, more than 2,000 to 3,000 innocent Indians have been killed in terrorist attacks in the hinterland alone during this period, with “thousands” more killed in Kashmir. He argues that the Hindu majority, “has been deeply affected by terrorism sponsored by Pakistan and its proxies within India” and that lived experience is what makes audiences naturally sympathetic to the director’s message. He says the film is not changing minds that much giving cinematic expression To a sentiment already widely prevalent.

He sketches a continuum:

They say US agencies had informed India about the infiltration of Al-Husseini, a ship carrying Lashkar-e-Taiba commandos, around November 19-20 – about six days before the attacks. The alert, he says, was circulated by the director of the Intelligence Bureau to all enforcement agencies, including the Maharashtra Police.

What failed in his assessment was:

He also describes a “vicious circle” he believes Pakistan and its proxies exploited: radicalising, inciting riots and communal tension, increasing terrorism – all while creating fear within the minority community about the majority. According to him, this was “a vicious game” rooted in deep ideological hostility towards “Hindu India”.

Based on his own reporting, he calls Dawood a “funder of Pakistani terrorism against India” who is indebted to Pakistan for sheltering him after the 1993 Bombay bombings, which killed more than 200 people. According to Gupta, Dawood’s main role is to arrange drug money for terrorist operations. He insists that the actual operational planning is done by the ISI and the Pakistan Army, with no meaningful separation from the political leadership. They say Dawood lives in Karachi, has a farmhouse near Pervez Musharraf outside Islamabad, and moves into ISI safe houses when pressure increases.

On the broader question of whether Pakistan has “succeeded” in terrorizing India, Gupta distinguishes between phases. He argues that in the first decade of this century, Islamabad’s “Karachi Project” – which used Indian Mujahideen cells to attack soft targets across the country between approximately 2004 and 2013 – resulted in huge losses, with at least a thousand civilian lives lost. But he believes the balance changed after that period.

He lists Indian responses – from the Uri surgical strikes to the Balakot air strikes (dubbed “Operation Bandar/Barak”) and “Operation Sindoor” against terror camps – and makes a political claim: “Only the Narendra Modi-led government could have ordered the strikes on the Jaish-e-Mohammed camp and Lashkar-e-Taiba bases in Bahawalpur.” He compared it to inaction under the previous UPA government despite 166 deaths and national humiliation after 26/11.

Today, Gupta argues, Pakistan itself is “in very, very hot water.” He indicates:

He said that Doval:

Yet when Verma returns to who the “real bigwig” is, Gupta is clear: in his view it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He argues that Modi has empowered the intelligence and enforcement agencies and created a team that can work on internal and external security. He highlights two key lieutenants: Home Minister Amit Shah, whom he credits with dismantling the Indian Mujahideen after the 2008 Ahmedabad blasts, and Doval, “who knows Pakistan like the back of his hand” and assures activists that if they act in the national interest, he will stand behind them.

It is this ecosystem – a dogged political will, an active security establishment, and a public that has lived through decades of trauma – that Shishir Gupta sees reflected, dramatically, on screen. He suggests that the film has become a phenomenon, not because it instills fear, but because it channels the memory that India has carried, often silently, for a quarter of a century.