����ֱ��

LONDON: A Sky News reporting team was confronted by Israeli troops during a recent assignment in the West Bank, the network disclosed on Friday.

Adam Parsons, Sky News Middle East correspondent, recounted that the Israeli military approached as his crew was filming a segment focused on the olive harvest season in Palestine.

“As we film, an Israeli military vehicle comes along a track and stops in a cloud of dust,” he wrote in the reportage titled “Defiance in the West Bank — despite encroaching threat from ‘unwanted neighbours.’”

Parsons continued: “The soldiers emerge and tell us we have to leave for our own protection, claiming that this olive grove is, in fact, a closed military zone.”

The correspondent, who was visiting the site of a recent attack by Israeli settlers on a Palestinian woman, said the military did not clarify what threat necessitated their departure.

Instead, they showed him and his crew a WhatsApp image of a basic map marked by a rectangle, describing it as a military order.

“We’re then told we can’t leave, and that the police are on the way to arrest us. We discuss the law. And then, as suddenly as it started, it’s over — we’re free to go. It’s just another flare-up on the West Bank.”

Our film from the West Bank, when we heard stories of violence, met the victims, saw an outpost being set up, and got detained by the IDF. All in one day

Palestinian farmers are 'attacked' and 'intimidated' during this year's ...

— Adam Parsons (@adamparsons)

In a statement to Sky News, the Israel Defense Forces said troops had been deployed “to thwart terrorism.”

The army also stated it “strongly condemns violence of any kind” and announced a review into the attacks reported by the network.

Violence targeting Palestinians in the West Bank has surged dramatically in recent years.

A growing number of settlers, supported by the government and shielded by military protection, have established makeshift outposts in the territory, often with little accountability.

Incidents of intimidation, harassment, violence, and even killings have become a daily occurrence, preventing Palestinians from accessing essential services and their own land, including olive groves.

Faced with worsening conditions, many Palestinians have abandoned the annual olive harvest, a centuries-old tradition typically observed in October and November. 

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under both international and Israeli laws.

Human rights organizations and UN experts described Israel’s actions in the West Bank as one of “total apartheid.”

NEW YORK: A US judge jailed two men for 25 years each Wednesday for a plot allegedly hatched by Tehran to kill Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, her team confirmed to AFP.
Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, both members of an eastern European criminal gang, orchestrated a failed plot to assassinate campaigning reporter Alinejad.
“They wanted to see me dead on my porch in Brooklyn and thanks to the law enforcement agencies, I am alive and Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader (of Iran), is humiliated,” Alinejad said outside a Manhattan courthouse following the sentencing, brandishing a sunflower.
“I was nervous but at the same time very empowered to speak the truth,” she added before dancing and singing in Farsi.
Amirov and Omarov were both jailed for 25 years, a spokesman for Alinejad said following the hearing, after prosecutors had sought 55-year terms for each, according to court filings.
According to the Justice Department, the jailed men, members of the eastern European crime network, were “contracted” by Ruhollah Bazghandi — identified as a brigadier general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — and other members of his network to murder Alinejad.
In July 2022, a man hired to carry out the assassination was arrested near Alinejad’s New York home with a loaded AK-47 assault rifle, the court heard over the two week trial.
The 49-year-old Alinejad, one of the most prominent dissident campaigners against Iranian authorities, for years has pushed for the abolition of the obligatory headscarf in Iran under the banner of “MyStealthyFreedom.”
She left Iran in 2009.
Charges were unsealed in October 2024 against Bazghandi, a former intelligence officer.
Three other Iranians with “connections to the government of Iran” — Hajj Taher, Hossein Sedighi and Seyed Mohammad Forouzan — were indicted over the affair.
The three are not in US custody and are believed to be in Iran. They face charges of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering.
Tehran has routinely rejected similar US accusations about alleged plots to kill American officials or politicians in the past.
The United States has also accused Iran of seeking to assassinate US officials in retaliation for Washington’s killing of Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
The State Department previously announced a $20 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the alleged Iranian mastermind behind a plot to assassinate former White House official John Bolton.