Masked Settlers Beat an NBC News Crew and a Palestinian Woman in Jalud. Netanyahu Called Them 'a Handful of Rioters.'

Masked Israeli settlers attacked and injured a Palestinian woman and three members of an NBC News team reporting in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, in an assault captured on video by the crew that had come to document exactly this kind of violence.

The team was in Jalud, a Palestinian town near Nablus, interviewing Aida Ahmed Abdullah, 51, and her family. Abdullah had told the journalists that settlers drove her out of her home. As the crew walked down a hill toward the house, a gray car with Israeli license plates reversed up the hill toward them. Video of the incident shows a masked man in a blue tracksuit leaning out of the rear passenger window holding a stick. When the car stopped, at least four men in dark clothing with their faces covered got out and began hitting Abdullah and the crew with sticks and throwing rocks.

"They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car," said NBC News international correspondent Matt Bradley, who was struck twice in the arm and treated at a nearby clinic. Producer Lawahez Jabari described the car rushing up the hill before its occupants beat members of the team and damaged camera equipment and one of the crew's vehicles. "Suddenly a car came to us," she said after receiving medical care. "The settlers had sticks. I saw a gun, but they didn't use the gun."

Camera operator Khaldoon Eid, who lives in the West Bank, said the location was what shocked him. "We didn't expect that — that they would come to attack," he said. "We were in the middle of a Palestinian area next to Palestinian houses." Abdullah was taken for care by the Red Crescent; an Israeli military and Border Police statement said her injuries were not life-threatening, and her husband, Mahmoud Toubasi, said her condition had improved but that she remained hospitalized Saturday night.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his spokesman, Doron Spielman, condemned the attack along with several other incidents in the area the same day, including dozens of masked settlers pepper-spraying Palestinian workers and throwing rocks at a building in nearby Qusra. Netanyahu said the "criminal acts of violence committed in the villages of Kosra and Jalud by a handful of rioters who violate the law, cause enormous injustice to the law-abiding settler public, hinder the IDF in fulfilling its missions and harm Israel's standing in the world." Spielman said the prime minister had asked security forces to "apprehend the perpetrators and to bring them to justice."

Israeli security forces said they arrived to find "dozens of rioters who had barricaded themselves inside a Palestinian home while Palestinian residents were inside," separated the groups, and confiscated vehicles belonging to Israeli rioters suspected of being used to reach the area. Soldiers and Border Police remained in Qusra and Jalud to prevent further disturbances, the statement said.

Qusra has been under sustained settler pressure for weeks. Between Jan. 1 and July 24, Israeli forces or settlers killed 76 Palestinians, according to the most recent data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; three Israelis were killed over the same period. The West Bank, captured in the 1967 war, is home to about 3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers. The U.N. and press organizations have reported a rise in attacks on foreign, Palestinian and Israeli journalists working there.