The Telling Way The Israeli Media Covered The Slaughter in Tell.

A group of armed settlers from an illegal settlement stormed a Palestinian village and killed locals, who defended themselves. But you wouldn't know it from the Israeli media.

On Friday morning a group of armed Israeli settlerswalked into the Palestinian village of Tell, southwest of Nablus like they owned the place. They had no authorization from the army to be there and certainly no legal right either. Areas A and B are closed to Israeli civilians. They came to the edge of the village near the mosque; they fired their weapons, and children with them shouted “revenge.” By the time it ended, four Palestinians were dead, two Israelis were dead, and the Israeli army was preparing a major operation against the village. Indeed, the IDF are planning an entire military operation in the West Bank to “punish” the Palestinians.

Within minutes the Israeli press had decided what happened. Ynet called it a shooting attack. Mako called it a terror attack. Channel 13 called it an attack. Calcalist called it an attack. The Hebrew word is pigua, and it means an act of terrorism by Arabs. That term is never used to describe what Jews do. The armed Israelis who entered the village were called metaylim, hikers. On a hamrless daytrip apparently This is a study in how one word does the work of an entire politics.

What the outlets called it

Start with the vocabulary, because the vocabulary tells you how Israelis think.

Ynet: “Shooting attack in Samaria: a Palestinian snatched the weapon of a security man, an Israeli was murdered.” Mako, the N12 site: “Attack in Samaria: a security man wounded after his weapon was snatched,” with the raiding group described as “Israeli hikers who were hiking near the village of Tell” and the Palestinians as “the terrorists who carried out the shooting.” Channel 13: “Palestinians snatched a weapon and opened fire,” the man who fired “eliminated.” Calcalist, the business paper: “murdered in a shooting attack,” the event beginning when “hikers got into a confrontation with Palestinians near a mosque.”

Four different newsrooms, one racially loaded form of grammar. The Israelis hike. The Palestinians attack. The Israeli is murdered, nirtzach, a word reserved for victims of crime. The Palestinians are eliminated, chuslu, a word used for enemy combatants. Nobody in that sentence entered anyone’s village.

The Jerusalem Post headline in English: “Two killed, three wounded, after Palestinian steals gun, shoots hikers.” Ynet’s English edition: “Israeli killed in West Bank terror attack identified as father of two who rushed to aid hikers.” Israel365: “Father of two killed rushing to aid attacked hikers.”

The frame set the response before any investigation. Netanyahu: “We will act with full force against the terrorists and those who send them.” Zamir vowed to hunt down “all the terrorists involved in the terror attack” and to “settle the score.” Herzog: “We must not allow terror to prevail.” Ben-Gvir demanded air power and D9 bulldozers to “erase the homes of terrorists and their supporters,” and said the villages of Judea and Samaria should be treated like Beit Hanoun in Gaza. Smotrich called the settlers “the defensive wall of the State of Israel.” Limor Son Har-Melech, deputy Knesset speaker: “Another October 7 at the door, you have been warned.” The army imposed a closure on Tell and Nablus and prepared what it called an extensive counterterrorism operation.

What the same outlets reported, further down

The remarkable thing is that the facts contradicting the frame were in the same articles, below the headline.

The IDF’s own investigation, cited by Haaretz, established that armed settlers entered Tell that morning on a hike the army had not approved, met Palestinians near the mosque, and that the Israelis fired into the air during the confrontation that followed. Army sources said Melet, the Havat Gilad security officer, was escorting the settlers’ patrol. The Times of Israel, whose English headline was more honest than most, described footage taken by one of the raiding settlers showing an armed Israeli firing his weapon in the air “amid shouts of ‘revenge’ by the young Israelis looking on.” Haaretz described the same footage: armed settlers pushing Palestinians back, and one of them striking a Palestinian in the head with a rifle butt, after which that Palestinian seizes the weapon. Ynet’s own video report described security forces and settlers in a violent confrontation before the shooting, an Israeli in civilian clothes kicking a Palestinian, and children shouting “whistle! yalla! revenge!”

So the sequence, per the Israeli army and Israeli footage, runs: illegal armed incursion, gunfire, a rifle butt to a man’s head, then the weapon is taken and turned on the men who brought it. That is not the story the headlines told. The headlines began at the moment the Palestinian picked up the gun.

The four Palestinian dead were shot by Israeli fire. In most of the Hebrew coverage they appear as a single sentence near the bottom, attributed to the Palestinian Health Ministry, with no names. The two Israeli dead were named, photographed, eulogized, and buried at a military funeral attended by ministers within the day. Six people died in the same twenty minutes. Two of them became people.

What Havat Gilad is

None of the coverage explained where the armed Israelis came from, which is the part that turns this from an incident into a pattern.

Havat Gilad was established in 2002 as an illegal outpost on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Far’ata. The Israeli Civil Administration issued demolition orders and the army razed it repeatedly in its early years; the settlers rebuilt it each time. It was founded by the family of Moshe Zar, who was convicted for his role in the Jewish Underground, the settler terrorist organization that in the 1980s planted bombs in the cars of Palestinian mayors, maiming Nablus mayor Bassam Shakaa, who lost both legs, and plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Palestinians have gone to court repeatedly alleging Zar’s land purchase documents were forged. The outpost has been adopted by B’nai Elim, an American Kahanist organization.

In 2018, after a resident of the outpost was murdered by Palestinian gunmen, settler leaders demanded the outpost be legalized before the victim was buried, and Avigdor Liberman delivered it. Peace Now called the legalization “a cynical exploitation of an abominable murder.” Most of the outpost’s homes still sit on private Palestinian land and cannot be legalized.

And in September 2025, the Civil Administration declared 455 dunams belonging to the villages of Tell, Jit, and Far’ata to be state land, for Havat Gilad’s benefit. Peace Now noted the declared land is a kilometer south of the existing outpost, meaning it is not legalization at all but the groundwork for a new settlement. Since this government took office, nearly half of all land ever declared state land since Oslo has been declared state land.

Tell is one of the villages whose land was taken last year for the outpost whose armed residents walked into it on Friday. No Israeli outlet mentioned this.

Haaretz, and the limits of the alternative

Haaretz did better than most. reported the IDF investigation showing the settlers entered without authorization. It reported that Melet was escorting the settler patrol. It described the rifle butt in the footage. It quoted a resident of Tell, Sheikh Durar, saying the settlers came from the east, attacked homes, and that this time they arrived armed. It ran a separate piece hours later on settlers rampaging through Far’ata in reprisal, burning fields, wounding six by gunfire, one critically.

And its headline read: “Two Israeli dead and four Palestinian dead in clashes in the Nablus area.”

Clashes. Imutim. The neutral noun, the one that implies two parties meeting in a field. An armed group from an illegal outpost entering an occupied village under army escort is not a clash. Haaretz knew that, its own reporting demonstrated it, and its headline still reached for the word that makes it symmetrical. Its follow-up called the reprisal attacks on Far’ata what they were, settlers attacking villages, but the original event, the one that killed six people, stayed inside the frame of a confrontation between two sides.

The difference between Haaretz and Channel 14 is smaller than it should be, and it is smaller in a specific way. Haaretz’s reporting was accurate and its framing was still symmetrical. The Palestinian dead in its headline were a number. The armed incursion was a clash. The word terror never attached to the men who came armed into a village that is not theirs, on land taken from that village, from an outpost founded by a convicted terrorist. If the country’s most critical paper cannot bring itself to name that, then the argument this column has been making for a month holds even here: the Israeli press does not need to lie to produce a false picture. It only needs to choose the neutral noun, put the Palestinian dead in the last paragraph, and let the state supply the headline.

Worth reading

Haaretz’s news report on the incident is the essential Hebrew document, because it contains the IDF investigation finding that armed settlers entered Tell without authorization, the detail that the outpost security officer was escorting them, and the footage description of a settler striking a Palestinian with a rifle butt before the weapon was seized. Read it against its own headline. haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2026-07-24/ty-article/0000019f-9299-df92-a7ff-b69b2b940000

The Times of Israel’s account is the only major English-language Israeli headline that named the cause, “gunfight sparked by settler raid of Palestinian town,” and its description of the raiders’ own footage, including the shouts of “revenge,” is the closest thing to a primary document. timesofisrael.com/2-israelis-4-palestinians-killed-in-gunfight-sparked-by-settler-raid-of-palestinian-town

And Peace Now’s file on the September 2025 declaration of 455 dunams belonging to Tell, Jit and Far’ata as state land for Havat Gilad is the context that explains why armed men from that outpost were in that village. peacenow.org.il/en/havat-gilad-declaration