Filming the aftermath of a violent raid by Israeli settlers who had established yet another illegal outpost in the occupied West Bank, a news television crew was in the Palestinian village of Tayasir last Thursday when soldiers walked into the frame.
What happened next was captured on camera: The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) men detained the journalists, and one soldier placed CNN photojournalist Cyril Theophilos in a chokehold, dragging him to the ground.
The day after the footage aired, IDF spokesman Lt Col Nadav Shoshani publicly apologised to the American channel CNN, and vowed a swift investigation.
By Sunday, March 29, it was decided that the reserve battalion would be pulled from the West Bank immediately. It was originally due to conclude this deployment at the end of April. Several hundred soldiers were assigned to a retraining programme aimed, in the IDF’s words, at “strengthening its professional and ethical foundations”.
No one was arrested.
The soldiers involved in the chokehold and detention of the CNN crew were not suspended either.
The IDF said “command measures” would follow in due course, without specifying what and when.
The response is not atypical of how the Israeli establishment behaves, especially because it had to, as its greatest ally US is where the journalists are from.
What’s also not atypical is how the soldiers behaved, especially because the battalion was largely part of the Netzah Yehuda. For many observers of the Israeli military, the name comes with a long and troubled history attached.
What is Netzah Yehuda?
Netzah Yehuda, or the 97th Battalion, is an infantry unit within the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Its name translates roughly from Hebrew as “Judah’s Victory”. It sits within the Kfir Brigade and, for most of its existence, has been stationed in the West Bank, the Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967.
This battalion was founded in 1999 with a specific social mission to give ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, known in Israel as Haredim, a pathway into the army. The Haredi community, which follows an intensely devout interpretation of Judaism and centres its life around religious study, has historically been largely exempt from military conscription, or compulsory military stint, in Israel.
That is a deeply controversial arrangement, and has caused resentment among secular and moderately religious Israelis who are required to serve.
The idea behind Netzah Yehuda was to create a unit that accommodated strict religious requirements: gender-segregated bases, rigorous observance of Jewish dietary laws (kashrut), and a religious atmosphere. It started with 30 soldiers.
What was the battalion doing in the West Bank?
By 2009 it had over 1,000 soldiers, and that number has held steady since. But its composition shifted as, by 2012, the majority of the unit was no longer drawn from the Haredi community. The soldiers came from a different, overlapping group called Dati Leumi, or Religious Zionists.
First, the umbrella ideological term.
Religious Zionism is a movement that combines Orthodox Jewish practice with the nationalist ideology behind the establishment of Israel. The nationalist ideology, Zionism, draws from the belief from centuries ago that God gave this land, where Israel and parts of the Middle East.West Asia, to the Jews.
The slight difference between Zionism and Religious Zionism matters to why this battalion, which assaulted journalists, gets into many such rows.
The broader movement called Zionism is the political ideology founded in the late 19th century that says the Jewish people are a nation and are entitled to a homeland in the historical land of Israel.
Its founding father, Theodor Herzl, was not religiously observant. Most early Zionists were driven not by religious scripture in the main, but by the felt need for a safe haven from European antisemitism, particularly after Hitler’s Holocaust and the Second World War.
The State of Israel, established in 1948, was their project.
But the Dati Leumi, or Religious Zionists, merged this nationalism with Orthodox Jewish faith. The Religious Zionists see the expansion of the Jewish state as a divinely ordained process. The practical consequence is that Religious Zionism is the ideological engine behind the “settler movement”, a term for illegal building of Jewish communities on occupied Palestinian land.
This is also the view that IDF soldiers from the more orthodox of Jewish communities hold.
In the Tayasir incident with the CNN crew last Thursday, the Netzah Yehuda reserve battalion’s soldiers said on camera that they believe the entire West Bank belongs to Jewish people.
One soldier freely acknowledged that the outpost settlers had established in the village was illegal under Israeli law, yet expressed confidence it would eventually be legitimised, CNN reported.
This comes at a time when Israel is facing increased scrutiny in the middle of its US-allied war on Iran. Its actions in Lebanon and now the West Bank are also attracting attention. It apparently wants to appear to be doing something about that, with this action against the Netzah Yehuda.
Who actually serves in Netzah Yehuda?
Technically, there is the 97th Battalion or Netzah Yehuda, which is an active-duty infantry division of 1,000-odd regular soldiers. And this unit is backed by the 941st Battalion or Netzah Israel, which is the reserve component made up largely of former soldiers from the active Netzah Yehuda battalion.
Technically, this reserve component, which has around 700 men, has been suspended after the latest incident with a CNN journalist. Its response rate is high among when called up for duty, the IDF has said in its defence.
In the Netzah Yehuda overall, at least 60% of the soldiers are Religious Zionists, as per Israeli news outlet Haaretz.
In fact, within that radical movement sits an even more extreme subgroup sometimes called Hardal — a Hebrew acronym blending Haredi religiosity with Dati Leumi expansionism — whose members hold maximalist views. They work on the ground with the “settler movement”, the network of Jewish communities built on Palestinian land. Men from this subgroup have increasingly become part of the Netzah Yehuda battalion.
And even a radical settlers’ group called ‘Hilltop Youth’ has members entering the battalion. This group gets its name as it comprises radical Israeli Jews known for violently establishing outposts on Arab/Muslim Palestinian hilltops without sanction from even the Israeli government.
A pattern of incidents
Long before the CNN confrontation brought American attention and some action, the Netzah Yehuda had attracted scrutiny for how its soldiers treated Palestinians too.
In 2015, a soldier from the battalion was jailed for nine months after being convicted of electrocuting Palestinian detainees on two separate occasions. The battalion accumulated a string of similar cases over the years involving beatings, abuse, and killings.
The most internationally reported of these incidents involved Omar Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American.
A US citizen who had returned to the West Bank in his later years, Omar Assad was bound, gagged, and left out in the cold after detention at a checkpoint by soldiers from this battalion in January 2022. He died from a heart attack. An autopsy indicated he had been beaten. No soldiers were prosecuted.
When the incident provoked outrage in Washington, as the man killed was a US citizen, the IDF transferred Netzah Yehuda from the West Bank to the Golan Heights, the territory Israel captured from Syria, in an apparent attempt to reduce the unit’s contact with Palestinians. It was the first time in over two decades that the battalion had been moved away from Palestinian territory, CNN reported.
It’s clearly back since, and back to its old ways.
Biden wanted to sanction Netzah Yehuda
In April 2024, the American news outlet Axios reported that the administration of then-President Joe Biden was considering formally sanctioning Netzah Yehuda under a US legislation known as the Leahy Law. This law prohibits the US from providing military assistance to foreign security units credibly accused of gross human rights violations.
This would have been a major declaration by Israel’s closest ally, that an IDF unit crossed a legal and moral line.
The Biden administration ultimately backed away after Israel said it had taken internal corrective steps.
After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, killed around 1,200 IDF soldiers and civilians in Israel, the Netzah Yehuda and its reserve battalion’s members were redeployed into active combat in IDF military operations that overall killed over 70,000 Palestinians in three years.
By 2024, a CNN investigation found Netzah Yehuda was also involved in training Israeli ground troops and running operational activities in Gaza.
Back and how
The Tayasir incident last Thursday brought the battalion back into global focus. The battalion has not been disbanded. The IDF’s reasoning is that Netzah Yehuda, whatever its problems, remains key to integrating religious communities into military service.
But IDF chief of staff Lt Gen Eyal Zamir ordered the suspension of the entire battalion citing a pattern of problematic incidents. The two specific soldiers most involved are likely to face further punishment. One of these soldiers named Meir had acknowledged to CNN that the settler outpost was illegal but said it would “slowly, slowly” be legalised.
Israel’s far-right leader and national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir has slammed the suspension, calling it a “grave mistake that harms our fighters and Israel’s deterrence capability”.
But analysts see an irony in that. Carlo Aldrovandi, assistant professor in international peace studies at Trinity College Dublin, wrote in 2024 that, despite Israel’s claim to run “the most moral army in the world”, it has repeatedly proved “unwilling to dismantle a battalion which appears to act as an independent militia with scant accountability to central command”.
