Mike Baker

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what occurred last week, well, here's a recap.

This unfolded in the village of Tayasir, where a CNN crew led by Jerusalem correspondent Jeremy Diamond was on the ground reporting on attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians.

At some point during that reporting, soldiers from the IDF's Netza Yehuda battalion stepped in.

According to CNN's account, the crew was detained for roughly two hours.

One of the soldiers placed photojournalist Cyril Theophilus in a chokehold, forced him to the ground, and damaged his camera.

Again, the CNN crew was released after a couple of hours.

The situation gained attention quickly, though, both inside Israel and internationally.

What stands out is what happened next, because in the days that followed, the IDF moved quickly and very publicly.

The Israeli military first condemned the incident, then made the decision to suspend the battalion's operational deployment altogether while launching a formal military police investigation.

An IDF spokesman said, quote, It was a bad incident that shouldn't have happened.

It doesn't represent how our soldiers should act, end quote.

And the response from Jerusalem didn't stop there.

In a formal statement, the IDF said the battalion would remain in reserve service while undergoing a process aimed at reinforcing its, quote, professional and ethical foundations, with the full findings of the inquiry expected to be released in the near future.

We're also starting to see accountability at the individual level, with one soldier dismissed, others reprimanded, and the soldier involved in the altercation now under formal military police investigation.

According to CNN's Jeremy Diamond, the incident, quote, laid bare the settler ideology motivating many of the soldiers who operate in the West Bank, with some troops, in his account, asserting that all Palestinians are terrorists.

If you look further into the Netza Yehuda Unit, also known as the 97th Battalion of the Kfir Infantry Brigade, it's an ultra-Orthodox unit that has faced scrutiny for years over alleged abuses in the West Bank.

It's drawn criticism not just within Israel, but also from U.S.

officials.

In fact, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been weighing sanctions against the unit, something that would have been unprecedented, before ultimately deciding not to move forward.

But Israeli President Isaac Herzog did, in fact, weigh in, condemning violence by what he described as IDF, quote, extremist elements in the West Bank, writing that those actions stand, quote, in stark contradiction to the values upon which Israel was founded, end quote.