There is a version of the West Bank that exists in official statements and diplomatic briefings — one of “security operations,” “clashes,” and a conflict contained by law, however imperfectly applied. And then there is the version described by those who spend their days moving between Palestinian communities under near-constant threat from settlers and the Israeli military.
Andrey X has, over the past two years, placed himself inside that second reality.
A Russian-born activist and journalist who acquired Israeli citizenship after leaving his home country, Andrey now lives for long stretches in the occupied West Bank, documenting a steady escalation of Jewish settler violence — from daily incursions into Palestinian villages to attacks that increasingly happen in cooperation with the Israeli military.
His work — short, immediate video dispatches from places rarely reached by international media — has found a wide audience online, particularly among activists and advocacy networks abroad. It has also placed him in direct confrontation with settlers, Israeli authorities, and the limits of what documentation alone can achieve.
What emerges from our conversation is not just an account of individual incidents, but a broader argument: that the violence is not episodic, but structural; not a breakdown of order, but, in his view, an expression of it.
We spoke about how he came to this work, what he has witnessed on the ground since October 7, 2023, and why he believes accountability — as it is commonly understood — remains out of reach.
Below is an edited transcript of the interview with Andrey X TNA: Could you talk a little bit about how you got into activism in the first place? What was your motivation behind wanting to document the violence in the West Bank? I got to the West Bank without intending to – this wasn't my plan at any point.
I got a degree in anthropology, and I was doing some research, and I was doing some sort of activism, but nothing related to West Asia, nothing related to Palestine. I was focusing in my research on the post-Soviet space.
But then Russia invaded Ukraine, which prompted my flight from Russia, and I got the easiest passport that I could get at the time – and that was the Israeli passport.
Within three months I had citizenship. And then it took me from six months to a year of learning, talking to people, reading up on the history to come to some conclusions about what's going on there.
And I was a blank slate when I arrived – I didn't have an opinion one way or another. I was, I would say, Zionist by default, meaning that I just adopted the position that I was surrounded by. This is what my circle believed.
But seeing the reality on the ground changed all of that for me. I, at some point, came to the realization that I didn't just arrive at a place and started a new life there, but that I had become part of a settler colonial project as a part of it. And, at that point, I felt like I needed to either leave or start doing something.
And so, I started getting more and more involved with various activists’ initiatives, first in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and then increasingly more in the West Bank . This was for maybe a year until October 7 when obviously everything was turned upside down and there was a massive escalation. Of course, we as activists understood that everything was about to be set on fire.
The situation in the West Bank, which was already very bad ever since the election of the current government that is still in power, where a very prominent and powerful position is held by what I would describe as the neo-Nazi faction led by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. We knew that everything was going to be set on fire. And I felt like, okay, I need to find something that I can do.
That was the West Bank to me, because I already knew the activists, I had the infrastructure to do something that would help people from this fire.
So, I started going to the West Bank more and more until, in May 2024, I moved to the village of Ras 'Ein al 'Auja in the South Jordan Valley, in the central West Bank, where I intended to spend just a month and then leave. But that month turned into two months, into three months, and as I was staying there, I was filming daily settler invasions and settler attacks against Palestinians.
At that time, there were maybe four to five settler invasions per day in the community, and I would film what was happening. But then I saw that that wasn't going anywhere – nobody was seeing what was happening.
Palestinian children were prevented from going to school by razor wire and Israeli soldiers — so they sat down and studied right in front of them https://t.co/pzbKiH1n2N pic.twitter.com/mJWwd69SwU — Andrey X (@the_andrey_x) April 20, 2026 So, I started doing a blog where I would record myself at the end of every day, like, “Today is day three, and today this happened, this happened, this happened,” adding the footage that I would have filmed and that would be filmed by other activists who were staying there with me. And that started blowing up.
Then I started getting messages from Palestinians all over the West Bank asking me to come and cover what's going on there with soldier attacks and settler attacks. And then I started going around the West Bank and I essentially moved there.
And, for the past two years now I've been living in the West Bank, documenting what's going on and working with various human rights advocacy groups and activist collectives. And given that you've spent so much time there over the last few years, can you give us a sense of what the escalation in the West Bank since October 7 looks like? Can you give us an idea as to what you’ve witnessed? First of all, it's important to note that the current wave of violence in the West Bank started not on October 7 but probably around late 2022 with the election of the current government. This was their plan to escalate in the West Bank and to take over more and more [land] because several settler leaders from West Bank settlements got very powerful positions in the government, and there were several large-scale pogroms.
There was the attack on Huwara, which was maybe 5 or 6 months before October 7, where an activist friend of mine had to carry the dead body of a Palestinian who was murdered by the army as they accompanied the settler pogrom against the village. And this was far from the only example of this escalation – the current one that has been going on for longer than since October 7.
But of course, the settler faction within the government really escalated things and saw the perfect excuse to escalate with October 7. And since then, it has been getting worse and worse and worse, because with each new escalation they're saying, “Oh, we can also do this now, and nobody will do anything to us, and there are no consequences.”
So, this expands the boundaries of what they're allowed to do all the time – whereas before it would have been difficult. Now there are very violent attacks, almost every day, once every two days, maybe.
And these low-level attacks where maybe someone will just come into your village – so a settler will march into a Palestinian community, maybe with a flock of sheep, and just stay there, maybe steal something, maybe just push people around – this happens maybe 10 to 15 times per day. Sometimes more across the West Bank and various communities.
And, as I said, it's getting worse and worse, where now we're seeing settlers just go into communities and shoot people and invade together with the army – where the settlers will launch the program and the army will accompany them and assist them and shoot at the Palestinians who try to defend themselves.
And the ultimate goal of that is, of course, the erasure of Palestinian life in the West Bank.
Currently, it is largely centred around Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank and is under full Israeli control both militarily and in the civilian manner. And it's almost empty of Palestinian presence.
For instance, the community where I lived for several months has gone – it was ethnically cleansed in January of this year. And now all of the South Jordan Valley Area C is completely empty of Palestinian presence. There are no more Palestinians left there. And it is very likely that within the next few months, we will see the final expulsion of Palestinians from that area.
And the settlers and the army are already moving on to setting up outposts and launching attacks on areas B and A, which didn't used to be the case. This was much more rare before and setting up outposts in areas A and B was unheard of until the past few months. But now they are popping up more and more and, as you said, this is an entire system – it’s not just settlers, it's settler attacks with the support of the Israeli army who are always there. How does your activism work fit into that? How does your activism work contribute to raising awareness and questioning the narrative that is so prevalent in Israel proper? We have to understand that we're not really countering anything.
This used to be the case a couple of years ago, before October 7, when there would be a settler attack or an army raid where activists would show up and just start filming, and then the settlers and the army would just pack up and stop because they don't want to be caught on camera.
But by now, this is not really the case.
The activists and journalists who are in the field get attacked themselves all the time in full view of cameras, and it's still not complete impunity because, for instance, I think two months ago, myself and a few activists and locals were attacked in the North Jordan Valley in the community of Hamam al-Malehand the settlers smashed our car and cut our tires.
And we when we barricaded ourselves inside the Palestinian house, they broke through the door, and they beat us for a while. And they did steal my phone, which had the footage of them attacking us. So clearly there is still some impact of this kind of stuff being filmed, but it's definitely much, much less than it used to be. @the_andrey_x On the day of Zionist violence — Jerusalem Day — activists from Free Jerusalem staged a counter-demonstration, demanding an end to fascism and freedom for Palestine ♬ original sound - Andrey X And this is in large proportion because the state is giving the settlers a lot more leeway. The settlers – you can view them like brownshirts in early 20th century Europe. They are a civilian avant garde who are doing a lot of the dirty work – a lot of the stuff that the government needs to be able to wash their hands from – and the government is allowing and facilitating it.
Sometimes they will reign it in, sometimes they will push back. If there is a lot of international attention and condemnation, they will demolish an outpost that the settlers set up. So, it's this fluid cat-and-mouse game where the avant garde of the settlers will push forward and the army will support them and then pull back their support in order to preserve their international image.
But the dynamic in the past few years has been very much in the direction of more violence, of more empowerment to the settlers, more financing of the settlers, and so on. I wonder, who are you doing the videos for exactly? Is it for people in Israel proper? Is it for people in the outside world and the international community? My target audience generally is the outside world, and it's the citizens of the countries that are supporting the Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the Israeli genocide in Gaza .
Because Israel, of course, without the support, they wouldn't be able to do any of this. Israel is able to maintain its system of apartheid and maintain its genocide in Gaza because it has an unlimited credit line from the West via weapons and trade.
My goal from the beginning has been to try to bring information about the West Bank to the outside [world] in order to empower activists and advocates all over the world to do something within their own countries in order to resist what is happening in Palestine on the ground.
Because I think despite the fact that activists on the ground are there and are in proximity to what's going on, arguably more can be done from the outside because Israel is very much reliant on outside support.
It is evident that Israel knows this and cares about it given the government's constant platitudes to Europe and to the United States, which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich because for them it's a bit of a different game and they would actually be happy if Israel was more isolated. But the more mainstream government like Netanyahu and Katz they understand that they need the support in order to continue the ethnic cleansing.
And so, I feel like the job of myself and of my colleagues and friends on the ground is to work against that. But I'm sure there are people in historic Palestine who have looked at your videos and who have seen your videos. How do you counter that narrative, not in terms of just the international media and the Israeli official government narrative? How do you convince someone inside Israel's 1948 boundaries whose only connection to Palestinians has been in the context of, maybe, as a soldier entering the West Bank or through Israeli media? For somebody looking at those videos, how do they react and how do you convince them to empathize with the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian question? When we're talking about Israelis in general, the stuff that I'm doing is pointless for that. This is not how you do it. Because the language that I use, the type of information that I give and so on, is not the way to talk to Israelis who have gone through an entire lifetime of dehumanization of Palestinians from kindergarten and school and from their entire environment and the media and the army.
You go through all these stages and then you're seeing this white guy on TikTok who came [to Israel ] four years ago – they’re not going to be convinced that way.
The way you do it is that you sit down and you are very empathetic, and you listen and you engage and you say, “Yes, I understand that. I understand that you believe that these children are going to grow up to be terrorist, so it's okay to kill them. But maybe, have you considered this other side?”
You need to do a lot of this kind of stuff, which I just don't have the energy and the patience for. But, I have, of course, a lot of respect for people who are who are doing this, who are sitting down. And have you found that they've been receptive to that kind of messaging? Largely, no, of course, because it's the effort of a couple of organizations against the effort of an entire massive propaganda machine. Of course, the propaganda machine is going to win until the propaganda machine is dismantled. Nothing is going to happen.
But on the local level, on the individual level, of course, it often works.
You have organisations like "Breaking the Silence, an organization which is made up of an exodus who have decided to speak out and talk about what they were doing and what they were told to do while they were serving and so forth.
And there are some dissidents, but very, very few. As you mentioned, you've had a lot of interactions with Israeli authorities and Israeli police, and I understand you have a few standing court cases as well in Israel. What has your relationship with Israeli authorities been like, especially since becoming such a big name and taking up your activism work? How have they responded to your work? It's important to understand that Israeli authorities’ attitude towards activist and journalistic work is going to heavily depend on your background and who you are, and what passport you hold, and what kind of blood flows through your veins.
It's not a standard fascist regime where if you go against it, you go to jail. I come from Russia. There, it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what the colour of your skin is, where you grew up, what languages you speak. If you speak against the government, you will be punished for it. You will be jailed, exiled, whatever.
But in the context of Israel, it's different. It depends on your blood. If you're a Palestinian, they can kill you, torture you, kidnap you, jail you with no charge. And they do. My colleague and friend, Ayman Ghraieb, has been in jail for more than six months now for making videos.
He was just going around the Jordan Valley and showing what was happening, and he was kidnaped and taken into administrative detention, which allows [the Israeli authorities] to just renew it for as long as they want.
However, with me, who is doing the same thing that Ayman was doing, they cannot do that because we live in two different worlds to two different legal systems. I hold an Israeli citizenship, and so they need to put me through the proper channels.
Of course they don't want to. They would like to revoke my citizenship and take me into administrative detention. And there has been an effort there. There were a few members of the Knesset who wrote a petition demanding that my citizenship be revoked. But there are checks and balances when it comes to Israeli citizens – when they're Jewish.
Of course, at the same time, you have Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who are supposed to have the same rights on paper, but it doesn't work like that and they also get kidnaped and jailed, just for posts on Facebook and the like.
You have that entire world where you can be jailed, oppressed and so on, and then you have the world that I live in just by virtue of the blood that flows through my veins and by virtue of the documents that I have, which makes it very difficult for the Israeli establishment to do anything against me.
They're trying to reverse it, but we’re not there yet. If you are an Israeli citizen and if you have Jewish blood, you can still say and do a lot of things. Staying on the citizenship – you’ve mentioned yourself in the beginning that it took you just three months to get a passport under the Law of Return, which is the 1950 bill that was passed by Israel that allows Jews and their families from around the world, to make Aliyah – to immigrate to Israel. And you've compared it yourself, just now, to the Palestinian situation, where some are unable to visit their relatives, let alone get a passport. So, my question is how do you feel about using this Jewish privilege in this context? Because I imagine you must have mixed feelings about living on occupied land. Look, there is the emotional side of things where when I meet my friends in the West Bank, or in ’48, who have families and are not allowed to even visit them, and they have to fly out. They were literally people who were expelled in 1948. And when I meet Palestinian friends outside of Palestine who are also unable to even visit their hometowns – of course, on the emotional level that infuriates me, and it is difficult.
And then there is the pragmatic and practical. This piece of paper with an Israeli coat of arms allows me to do the work that I do.
I know that if I knew everything that I know now, four years ago, I wouldn't have gotten the Israeli citizenship. I would really want to do that. But I'm glad now. I'm glad that I did that post factum, because this is the thing that allows me to do what I'm doing.
If I were Palestinian and I was doing this, I would have been dead. If I were an international and I was doing this, I would have been deported a long time ago. But it happened. So I have this piece of paper which allows me to do what I'm doing and get away with it. @the_andrey_x YOU can affect Israeli policy! Here is proof ♬ original sound - Andrey X I wanted to speak a little bit about Umm Al Kheir, if I may, because I know it's a village that is very close to you. And the killing last July of Awdah Hathaleen – I know you were there during the very painful process after the incident. Awdah was of course killed by an Israeli settler, shot dead by an Israeli, who I think three days after the incident was just roaming around in his settlement with total impunity, whereas members of Awdah’s family were imprisoned very quickly after the incident and his body was not returned until days later. I wondered if you could speak a little bit about that incident – maybe tell the audience, if you can, what that was like and how you think that unfortunately exemplifies the reality of Palestinians every day in the West Bank. Yeah. Here is a very telling case study of the occupation in the West Bank, the residents of Umm Al Kheir have lived there since around 1948. They used to live next to Arad in the Naqab desert, from where they were expelled in 1948.
They eventually purchased land where they are now in the South Hebron Hills in the West Bank. They have all the necessary papers. They lived there until 1967 under Jordanian occupation. And then the West Bank was taken over by Israel in 1967 and the processes that Israel was employing in order to kick the Palestinians out of their land in ‘48, they started employing in the West Bank as well.
In 1980, about half of the land of was taken for an army base. This is one of the few ways in which you can take over land on the areas that you're occupying. You can say that it’s needed for security purposes. And so they cut off half of the village, and they set up a military base.
Two years later, they decided that they no longer needed the military base for security purposes and they turned it into a civilian settlement called Carmel, which this is one of the closest settlements to Palestinian communities that you can see in the West Bank, because it's literally sometimes close to three or four metres between a settler home and a Palestinian home. And the settlers, of course, are surrounded by a barbed wire fence and they build roads right through the community.
Since the early 1980s, the settler movement and the army have been trying to take over more and more land and to kick the family out of their land despite the fact that they have all the necessary papers through demolition orders and through attacks and through invasions.
This has been a fight for decades, and hence there is a lot of activist presence there since the early 2000 because the residents of the village and the local Palestinian activists have been trying to make connections with activists all over the world and to bring them on the ground.
The situation here, as in all of the West Bank, got much worse after October 7. [The settlers] are taking over the land which the Palestinians have papers to and started constructing caravans and at the same time damaging and destroying the Palestinian infrastructure that was there – the olive trees, the water pipes, and so on and so forth.
Almost exactly a year ago, this culminated in an excavator belonging to this demolition company, which is headed by, Yinon Levi – the famous settler who is personally responsible for the ethnic cleansing of several communities to the west of Umm Al Kheir – Zanouta and Imneizil famously, where hundreds of Palestinians used to live there. Right now, they're ruins.
He owns a demolishing company which has been contracted by the Israeli state to demolish houses in Gaza, and that demolition company is based, from what I understand, in Meitarim settlement in the south Hebron Hills .
One excavator was contracted to this new outpost that the settlers set and, on the day of the murder, the excavator went to the outpost through Palestinian land where there is actual infrastructure. Of course, this was done intentionally with the goal of damaging the water pipe, which is supplying the community centre and the freshly planted olive trees, which were also there. The excavator drove into the outpost and then drove out, at which point the community members confronted the excavator and tried blocking it.
The excavator driver hit one of the members of the community, Ahmed, with the arm of the excavator. Yinon Levi arrived in his car and confronted the community members and pulled out a pistol and fired twice into the crowd. One of the bullets hit Awdeh, the informal leader of the community, in the chest. He, bled out, essentially, there on the ground.
He was standing in the back with his son, who was just three years old at the time. He was just filming what was going on. Some paramedic activists who were there tried to help him.
And the army arrived a few minutes later, and Yinon Levi, the murderer, pointed out the people that he wanted arrested – several activists, including the paramedics, were trying to revive Awdeh and several Palestinians who were there. The army followed the directions, the orders of the murderer.
A friend of mine, an activist who was there on the ground, Matan, came up to the soldiers and said, “What are you doing? He just killed somebody!” And he told me that three separate soldiers told him, “I wish it was me. I wish I was the one who shot him.” And at that point, they simply drove away.
The army arrested several members of the community and over the course of the next several days, they would kidnap, I think, 23 members of the family – essentially all the older men – and they were placed into the Ofer concentration camp, which is notorious for its horrible conditions. They were deprived of food and sleep and they were beaten, and deprived of medication, and they were held for several days and then they were released.
Yinon Levi was also arrested, and then he was released, I think two days after that after the judge said that there was not enough evidence [to show] that he was the one who shot Awdeh, which is especially ridiculous given that the incident was filmed from many different directions. There is very clear footage of him doing it, of course.
But the judge said that there was no evidence that it was him. And he was free. And he was back, as you said, I think three days after the murder – he was back at the outpost, right in the middle of the community.
While the body Awdeh was withheld for 10 or 11 days. The Israeli state was trying to negotiate with the family, demanding that he's not buried in his land where he was born and where he lived – that he would be buried somewhere else with no friends or family coming and with no outsiders coming.
In the end, the women of the community went on a hunger strike and several days later, the Israeli state relented and gave back the body. But on the day of the funeral, they designated the area a closed military zone in order to prevent people from coming. And, to this day, of course, Levi is free – just like all the settlers who keep doing this kind of thing, who come in and attack and kill and destroy and injure and launch pogroms.
And of course, they are not facing justice because they're not really committing a crime by Israeli government standards, because a crime is breaking the order of things that is set up by the powers that want this to happen. The powers that want Palestinians to be expelled. This is what the goal of the Israeli government in the West Bank is.
That situation just acts as a representative of the state just fulfilling the program. And of course, he is not going to face consequences for it. So, in that case, what does actual accountability look like? Or does it look like there is no hope at all given that the system is entrenched and in fact incites or allows for settler violence like this within Israeli law? For the murder – just like all the other murders perpetrated by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank under the system of Zionist apartheid – then no, of course not.
Because, you know, Levi is not a an individual. What matters is not his internal evil – I don't know him, I met him in the field a couple of times, but I've never spoken to him, I don't know what's in his head.
But it's not really relevant. He wasn't doing this out of some internal evil or anything. He was just functioning within the system that existed. And we’re seeing this on Levi and many other leaders who are perpetrating horrible crimes.
They're just functioning within the system that doesn’t just allow them to do it, but that encourages them to do it. Any sort of accountability, any semblance of justice, will require the complete dismantlement of that system. This next question is a very broad question, but I'm curious what your opinion is in terms of justice and accountability and return of Palestinian refugees. What would you like to see happen on the ground? Is it a one state solution or a two-state solution like the European Union and the United Nations and everyone keeps talking about and reinforcing, despite continuing annexation and the reality on the ground making it very improbable to have a two-state solution? If you ask me what I want, what is my dream solution – it’s no states at all. No war, no violent government, no vertical systems of suppression and enforcement from the top down. And no bloody competition between different states that are fighting over resources.
I would like, you know, general horizontal solidarity between people and mutual aid and all of that. And as farfetched as that sounds, any kind of two-state and one-state solution also is as farfetched.
Right now, we are living under a one-state apartheid reality, and that's all we're getting. A two-state solution is not any more realistic than a one-state solution. Right now, they're both fantasy, choosing between the two. Of course, I choose one-state, because I think that splitting up the land is ridiculous.
There aren't too many silver linings, except perhaps the fact that we have this unprecedented movement of solidarity across the world, which hasn't happened for probably any cause in the history of humanity. And hopefully down the line, this will mean that Zionist politicians across the world will just become unelectable and it will become unsustainable to support the apartheid and ethnic supremacy.
And maybe that will at some point cut off this infinite line of credit that Israel has and lead to some real changes on the ground. But of course, this is a very long-term thing, and we're playing the long game. But then again, Palestinians have been playing the long game for the 100 years of ethnic cleansing. Well, I think that's somewhat of a hopeful note to end on. Thank you for coming into the studio and talking to us.