In the annals of shameless media bias, CNN has just delivered another punch. On March 26, 2026, in the Palestinian village of Tayasir in Judea and Samaria, a CNN crew led by correspondent Jeremy Diamond and photojournalist Cyril Theophilos didn’t just stumble into a tense security situation, they went hunting for one. They were there to film the aftermath of an Israeli settler attack and the establishment of a new illegal outpost. Fair enough, if you’re into selective outrage. But when IDF soldiers from a reserve battalion showed up to secure the area and prevent clashes, the crew was ordered to stop filming. Standard procedure in a military zone under operational pressure. CNN refused. They kept rolling. Seventy-three seconds later, one soldier put Theophilos in a chokehold from behind, slammed him down, and damaged his camera. The crew was detained for two hours.
And then the IDF did what it always does when the international press cries foul: It punished its own. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir suspended the entire reserve battalion, hundreds of reservists pulled from operations and sent for “ethics training.” The soldiers’ on-camera comments echoing settler ideology? Undeniably dumb and off-message. But let’s be brutally honest: This wasn’t some rogue war crime. It was exhausted troops in a powder keg dealing with hostile cameras that have spent years painting every Israeli action as villainy.
Here’s the real story CNN won’t tell you straight: These soldiers operate in Judea and Samaria, where Palestinian terror attacks are a daily reality, where settlers and locals clash in a conflict CNN has framed for decades as one-sided Israeli aggression. The network that spent years downplaying or contextualizing Hamas’s October 7 massacre, that obsesses over “settler violence” while Palestinian rock-throwing, stabbings, and shootings get softer treatment, decided this was the hill to die on. They waltzed into a hotspot explicitly to capture “gotcha” footage of IDF overreach—then acted shocked when soldiers, fed up with being the eternal bad guys in the global narrative, lost their cool.
