Israel Releases Oscar-Winning Palestinian Director After Attack by West Bank Settlers

HEBRON, West Bank — Israeli authorities released an Oscar-winning Palestinian director who was detained by the army after being attacked by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. He said they beat him in front of his home while they filmed the assault.

Hamdan Ballal and the other directors of “No Other Land,” which looks at the struggles of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, had mounted the stage at the 97th Academy Awards in Los Angeles earlier this month when it won the award for best documentary film.

On Tuesday, with bruises on his face and blood on his clothes, he was released from an Israeli police station in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. He and two other Palestinians who had been attacked and detained were taken to a nearby hospital.

Ballal said he was held at an army base, blindfolded for 24 hours and forced to sleep under a freezing air conditioner.

“All my body is pain,” he told The Associated Press. “I heard the voices of the soldiers, they were laughing about me … I heard ‘Oscar’ but I didn’t speak Hebrew.”

Lea Tsemel, the attorney representing the three men, said they received only minimal care for their injuries from the attack and that she had no access to them for several hours after their arrest.

Palestinian residents say around two dozen settlers — some masked, some carrying guns and some in military uniforms — attacked the West Bank village of Susiya on Monday evening as residents were breaking their fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Soldiers who arrived pointed their guns at the Palestinians, while settlers continued throwing stones, they said.

The Israeli police said Tuesday that the military transferred to it three suspects for investigation for alleged rock throwing, property damage and “endangering regional security.” It said the three were released on condition of no contact with others involved in the incident. Tsemel said Ballal and the other two Palestinians denied throwing stones.

‘I’m dying!’

In testimony given to his lawyer while in detention, Ballal said he had gone out to film the settlers as they attacked houses in the village. When he returned to his home, a well-known settler who had threatened him in the past showed up with two soldiers, according to the testimony, seen by the AP.

At his house’s entrance, the settler punched Ballal in the head from behind, knocking him to the ground, then kicked him with his boots across his body and beat his head and face, Ballal said.

Lamia Ballal, the director’s wife, said she was huddling inside with their three children and heard him screaming, “I’m dying!” When she looked out the window, she saw three men in uniform beating Ballal with the butts of their rifles and another person in civilian clothes who appeared to be filming the violence.

“Of course, after the Oscar, they have come to attack us more,” Lamia said. “I felt afraid.”

West Bank settlers are often armed and sometimes wear military-style clothing that makes it difficult to distinguish them from soldiers.

On Tuesday, a small bloodstain could be seen outside their home, and the car’s windshield and windows were shattered. Neighbors pointed to a nearby water tank with a hole in the side that they said had been punched by the settlers.

The settler who beat Ballal can be seen with masked men threatening him in a widely circulated video from April.

“This is my land, I was given it by God,” the settler says in the video, shouting profanity and trying to provoke Ballal to fight him. “Next time it won’t be nice,” the settler says.

Film looked at Palestinians’ struggle to stay on the land

“No Other Land” chronicles the struggle by residents of the Masafer Yatta area to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages.

The joint Israeli-Palestinian production has won a string of international awards, starting at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. It has also drawn ire in Israel and abroad, as when Miami Beach proposed ending the lease of a movie theater that screened it.

Basel Adra, another of the film’s co-directors and a prominent Palestinian activist in the area, said there’s been a massive upswing in attacks by settlers and Israeli forces since the Oscar win.

“Nobody can do anything to stop the pogroms, and soldiers are only there to facilitate and help the attacks,” he said. “We’re living in dark days here, in Gaza, and all of the West Bank … Nobody’s stopping this.”

Masked settlers with sticks also attacked Jewish activists in the area on Monday, smashing their car windows and slashing tires, according to Josh Kimelman, an activist with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. Video provided by the group showed a masked settler shoving and swinging his fists at two activists in a dusty field at night.

Open-ended military rule

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want all three for their future state and view settlement growth as a major obstacle to a two-state solution. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal.

Israel has built well over 100 settlements, home to over 500,000 settlers who have Israeli citizenship. The 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering population centers.

The Israeli military designated Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s and ordered residents, mostly Arab Bedouin, to be expelled. Around 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, but soldiers regularly demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards.

Settlers have also set up outposts in the area and at times attack villages. Palestinians and rights groups say Israeli forces usually turn a blind eye or intervene on behalf of the settlers.

The war in Gaza has sparked a surge of violence in the West Bank, with the Israeli military carrying out widescale military operations that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and displaced tens of thousands. There has been a rise in settler violence as well as Palestinian attacks on Israelis.