A mob of Israeli settlers has attacked Palestinian filmmaker and activist Hamdan Ballal just three weeks after the documentary he co-directed on the violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, No Other Land, won an Oscar.
According to his co-director Yuval Abraham and witnesses, per Haaretz, Ballal called an ambulance after settlers attacked him but was detained by Israeli soldiers who stopped the ambulance to arrest him. His current condition and location is unknown.
Abraham described the attack as a lynching when reporting the incident on Monday, and said the mob was “KKK-like.” “They beat [Ballal] and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since,” he wrote on social media.
According to Haaretz, the soldiers who abducted Ballal “were members of a rapid-response unit composed of settlers from nearby settlements.”
“I’m standing with Karam, Hamdan’s 7 year old son, near the blood of Hamdan’s in his house, after settlers lynched him,” said No Other Land co-director Basel Adra on social media. “This is how they erase Masafer Yatta.”
The attack came as settlers were raiding the southern occupied West Bank village of Susiya, where Ballal is from, and around which Israeli settlers have established an illegal settlement. Susiya is a village in Masafer Yatta, which is the focus of No Other Land.
Witnesses said that settlers ordered Palestinians to leave their homes and were attacking them, destroying water tanks and other property, Haaretz reports. Police refused to stop the violence when they were called to the scene by American activists, and the settlers fled after Israeli military personnel arrived.
The attack is a show of the type of violence that Palestinian filmmaker and activist Basel Adra and his family have experienced for decades in Masafer Yatta — and that Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are subjected to on a daily basis.
Ballal had written about being witness to the violence in the village, perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers, while he was helping to make the film. “The film is our attempt to answer [Palestinians’ demand for change]: to take the camera, and the years of documented protests, demolitions, and violence, and do something to change the lives of the people of Masafer Yatta,” Ballal wrote in March 2024.
The activist has also written about the struggle for Palestinians in Susiya in particular, writing in October 2023 that it has become “increasingly difficult to distinguish between settlers and soldiers” in the village since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and that Israeli forces had intensified their occupation in the region.
“While the whole world is watching Israel’s assault on Gaza, the settlers have seized the opportunity to ramp up their attacks in an attempt to forcibly and systematically displace hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Palestinians,” Ballal wrote at the time.
Indeed, Adra pointed out in a Haaretz interview ahead of the Oscars that winning the coveted award wouldn’t change the fact that Palestinians in Masafer Yatta live under the constant threat of brutality and expulsion by Israeli settlers and soldiers.
“I don’t care about the Oscar. I live in a completely different reality from the world of Hollywood or Bollywood,” Adra said. “And even if we get there and succeed, I will go back to my cruel reality. But I also understand that an Academy Award, as a prize, is important to people, and I hope this will serve the good of our struggle. That’s the only thing that interests me in this whole story.”
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