Cover of the weekly magazine, L'Espresso, from Friday 10 April,

"A man with kippah and peyot, the curls of Orthodox Jews, frames a woman wearing a hijab in patterned fabric with his cell phone. He is an armed Israeli, she is a Palestinian girl. But more than the clash of religions or civilizations, to hit those who watch “The abuse” denounced by the cover of the new issue de The Express it is the inhumanity of the grin on the settler's face, while he happily frames with his cell phone the Arab girl with a grieving face, one of the victims of the increasingly frequent raids in the West Bank. It is an image of the daily abuses suffered by those who had the misfortune of being born in the territories that the settlers claim to occupy to realize the dream of the “Great Israel”: a project that refers to the Bible and tramples on international law, as it says Daniele Mastrogiacomo in the cover article. And which is being built thanks to ongoing crimes by settlers with the support of the Israeli army, and without any concrete condemnation from the international community: the painful article of Alae Al Said, marked by the reportage of Pietro Masturzo of which the cover photo is part, it tells of a campaign of ethnic cleansing that follows the genocide in Gaza".

The image on L'Espresso's cover is a real photograph taken by Italian photographer Pietro Masturzo as part of a West Bank settlers reportage;

The same man appears in other photos by AFP's Hazem Bader.

The photograph was taken in the West Bank by Peter Masturzo, with details on the publication's site in Italian: https://lespresso.it/c/attualita/2026/4/9/labuso-nuovo-numero-lespresso/61221 The image Is real an it is. confirmed by its author, the Italian photo reporter Pietro Masturzo. https://www.facta.news/antibufale/copertina-espresso-colono-israeliano

Testimony of Pietro Masturzo:

Many people are asking whether this photo was generated with AI, and others are pointing me to posts claiming it has been confirmed that the photo was AI-generated.

Well, NO—the photo in question is not the product of artificial intelligence.

I took this photo in the Palestinian village of Idhna (west of Hebron) on October 12, on the first day of the olive harvest. It was supposed to be a day of celebration. In addition to the landowners and the various Palestinian families who came to help with the harvest, there were also local Palestinian authorities, a group of international activists, and several Palestinian and international journalists, including the New York Times.

At the very start of the harvest, a group of armed Israeli settlers arrived (some of whom were wearing military uniforms, like the settler in question), accompanied by actual soldiers (with covered faces), who prevented the Palestinians from harvesting their own olives. The expression of the settler in the photo and the action he is repeating are part of a gesture mimicking a shepherd calling his flock, directed at Palestinians as if they were animals.

I hope this video, filmed by my colleagues @samuele_pellecchia and @francescogiusti_xyz, helps clarify the context.

Event Notes