Hamdan Ballal, one of the Palestinian directors of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” was beaten by West Bank settlers and then taken from his ambulance by the Israeli military, according to a local publication and fellow activists.
“Now: The Oscar-winning director and journalist Hamdan Ballal was attacked by settlers in the South Hebron Hills and wounded in his head and chest,” Local Call, a left-wing publication with Israeli and Palestinian contributors, tweeted on Monday after 9 p.m. local time. “As he was being evacuated, he was taken from the ambulance and arrested by the army.”
The activist group Center for Jewish Nonviolence wrote on the social network BlueSky that Ballal was assaulted in an armed attack by settlers on the village of Susiya, where the group has long been active.
“No Other Land,”which chronicles Israeli demolitions in the Palestinian village of Masafer Yatta, in the same area of the West Bank, won the Academy Award for best documentary earlier this month, with Ballal onstage. It has yet to find a U.S. distributor, which Ballal’s Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham has attributed to its controversial content. Israeli officials have denounced the film, with Culture Minister Miki Zohar decrying it as “sabotage against the State of Israel.”
The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident, which comes amid an uptick in violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Abraham posted from the scene of the attack and linked it to the film.
“I’m standing with Karam, Hamdan’s 7 year old son, near the blood of Hamdan’s in his house, after settlers lynched him,” Abraham tweeted close to midnight local time. “Hamdan, co-director of our film No Other Land, is still missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding. This is how they erase Masafer Yatta.”
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