A CNN crew says it was attacked by Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria on Saturday near the Arab village of Sinjil, in the disputed territory north of Ramallah. Four Israelis were detained by police following the alleged confrontation, and the network has run the story across its international wire under the headline of “settler violence.” There is no video, no photograph, and no independent footage of the alleged assault, even on the CNN reporting. The entire account rests on the word of the CNN crew itself, the same outlet that stands accused, repeatedly and with documentation, of running interference for Hamas.
The term “disputed territory” is used here deliberately, in place of “occupied West Bank.” Judea and Samaria were never a sovereign Arab land conquered by Israel. “Occupied” presumes the land belongs to someone else. That premise is the one CNN wants its viewers to accept without argument. Historically, the region has been referred to as Judea and Samaria.
What CNN reported, and what CNN did not show
According to CNN’s own account, four Israelis blocked the network’s vehicle as the crew tried to leave the area where Sayfollah Musallet, a Palestinian-American, died a year earlier in a confrontation with local Jewish residents. Musallet traveled to Sinjil last July as part of a larger group of Palestinians who set out, after Friday prayers, with the stated intention of confronting Israelis over a disputed plot of land and a nearby Jewish community. The Israel Defense Forces said the violence broke out after Palestinians threw rocks that lightly injured two Israeli civilians, touching off a wider clash that included arson and vandalism of property on both sides. Musallet died in the melee that followed. That sequence of events, an organized confrontation that turned violent after Israelis were injured first, is nowhere to be found in most Western coverage of his death, including CNN’s, which frames the encounter as an unprovoked mob attack on a man simply visiting family. CNN reported that the men carried rods and stones and that one brandished a knife. Israeli police confirmed that four suspects were detained, and that officers recovered clubs and a knife from a vehicle. The Israel Police statement on the incident treats the allegation with the seriousness any attack on journalists deserves, and the investigation is ongoing.
There is still no bystander video, no dashcam footage, no still photograph of the confrontation itself has surfaced anywhere, not from CNN, not from the other journalists CNN says were present, not from the Israeli security forces who responded to the scene. A network that built its Gaza coverage on a foundation of unverifiable claims from a Hamas-run health ministry is asking the world to accept, without a shred of visual evidence, that Jewish civilians assaulted its staff. The demand for proof runs in one direction only.
A pattern, not an accident
CNN’s record on this conflict indicates an anti-Israel bias. The network’s 2023 documentary “Inside Hamas” opened with footage of terrorists screaming “Allahu Akbar” as they murdered Israeli civilians, then spent the following fifty minutes asking analysts to define Hamas as a “nationalist movement” and a “social, religious, political movement,” without once pressing the follow-up question of what “liberation” means to an organization whose founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction and the annihilation of all Jews. CNN correspondent Sara Sidner posed the question to her guests as though the definition of a US-designated terrorist organization were a matter of legitimate debate.
CNN has also run casualty figures from the “Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, drawing from sources in the Hamas-controlled territory” dozens of times since the war began, a formulation that launders numbers originating with Hamas through a Palestinian Authority office that has had no independent access to Gaza since Hamas seized the territory in 2007. The network severed ties in November 2023 with a freelance photographer, Hassan Eslaiah, after it emerged that he had been photographed with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and had entered Israel alongside the terrorists carrying out the October 7 massacre. CNN nonetheless included the work of other photographers with documented ties to Hamas events in its year-end photo galleries as recently as 2024. An organization with this record does not deserve the benefit of the doubt when it reports, without any corroborating footage, that Jewish settlers attacked its crew.
Ro Khanna’s detention claim, and the diplomatic protocol he ignored
Congressman Ro Khanna, a California Democrat weighing a 2028 presidential run, made a parallel claim days earlier, saying he was surrounded and detained by armed Israeli settlers and then by IDF soldiers near the village of Khirbet Zanuta. The Israeli military’s own statement tells a different story. The IDF said its troops responded to a report of Israeli civilians blocking foreign nationals, dispersed the civilians, and allowed Khanna’s group to proceed, the opposite of Khanna’s account that soldiers sided with the settlers and that only the American embassy secured his release.
A sitting member of Congress touring an active military and security zone during wartime has an obligation to coordinate his movements with Israeli authorities in advance. Israel is a sovereign nation defending itself in the aftermath of the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and a foreign legislator who enters a friction zone without clearing his itinerary through official channels invites exactly the kind of chaotic, ambiguous encounter Khanna now describes as a human rights violation. The protocol exists to protect visitors and soldiers alike. Ignoring it and then blaming the security forces for the results is not candor. It is political theater built for a presidential campaign.
Khanna’s own language during the trip removes any doubt about his framing going in. He told Reuters he came to see “the human toll of Israeli occupation,” accused Israel of “genocide in Gaza” and “apartheid in the West Bank,” and declared that any Democrat unwilling to echo those charges is “morally compromised.” His remark that he saw “the arrogance in the eyes” of the young Israeli soldiers guarding the area, delivered as a description of Jewish men in their late teens and early twenties doing mandatory service to defend their country, trades in the oldest antisemitic caricature in circulation, the arrogant, menacing Jew who must be exposed before the world. A congressman who arrived already convinced that Israel is committing genocide and apartheid was never going to describe that encounter any other way, regardless of what actually happened on the ground.
Khanna’s conduct on this trip went beyond selective sympathy. A source familiar with the planning told the New York Post that Khanna’s staff first contacted the Israeli Embassy on July 2 and described the visit as private, saying the congressman would not be meeting with Israeli or Palestinian politicians. On Monday, Israeli officials offered Khanna’s team a meeting with October 7 survivors and former hostages. The offer was ignored. Israeli officials followed up the next day. Khanna’s team never responded. “Congressman Khanna didn’t come to understand the situation, he came looking for a headline,” the source said. “Israel went out of its way to provide Congressman Khanna with access to communities that reflected the complexity of the situation, he chose a different path.” Israel also offered meetings with Druze communities in the Golan Heights, representatives of Israeli border communities near Gaza, and a briefing on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. Khanna’s team declined all three.
Over 1,200 people were murdered and 251 taken hostage in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre, some held for as long as 843 days. Khanna had a standing invitation to sit with the people who lived through that day. He chose a Palestinian village and a viral video of an encounter with Israeli settlers instead, an encounter the Israeli military disputes in key respects, stating troops dispersed the settlers rather than joining in any detention.
None of this is new for Khanna. He has hosted Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, whose three million followers have heard him call Orthodox Jews “inbred,” describe Israeli soldiers and settlers as members of “the Jewish KKK,” and declare that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than the State of Israel. Piker has also dismissed the documented sexual violence Hamas terrorists committed on October 7, telling his audience that whether rapes occurred “doesn’t change the dynamic” for him. When pressed on Meet the Press about continuing to appear on Piker’s show, Khanna compared him to Joe Rogan and said he had no regrets.
Khanna also campaigned this year for Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate whose bid collapsed after a woman told Politico he had forced her to have sex with him in 2021. Khanna stood by Platner through the exposure of a chest tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol and Reddit posts dismissing sexual assault victims, only withdrawing his endorsement once the rape allegation became public. A congressman capable of drawing a line at rape has shown himself consistently unwilling to draw one anywhere else.
The data behind the narrative
The Regavim Movement’s report “False Flags and Real Agendas,” released last year, examined the United Nations database that supplies most Western governments and media outlets with their “settler violence” statistics and found that more than 98 percent of the incidents catalogued under that label were clashes between Arabs and IDF soldiers involving no Israeli civilians whatsoever. Regavim documented lawful Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, hikers at historical sites, and government infrastructure projects in Area C all recorded in the same database as acts of settler violence, built almost entirely on uncorroborated Palestinian sourcing. The report also found that Israeli law enforcement pursues nationalist-motivated crime by Jews far more aggressively than equivalent crimes by Arabs, even in cases Regavim’s own data describe as serious or life-threatening.
Meir Deutsch, Regavim’s director general, put the purpose of the campaign plainly: it manufactures a moral equivalence between the Jewish state and the terrorist organization sworn to erase it. The Sinjil story and the Khanna story are not isolated incidents. They are the raw material this campaign runs on, an unverified claim, a sympathetic camera, and a network with every incentive to run the story before anyone asks for the footage.
