DayofPal– Palestinian filmmaker and Academy Award winner Hamdan Belal was brutally assaulted by what his colleague described as a “lynch mob” of Israeli settlers on Monday night in the Palestinian village of Susya, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
Following the attack, Belal was reportedly taken into Israeli military custody, and his current whereabouts remain unknown.
According to Yuval Abraham, his co-director and fellow Oscar laureate for No Other Land, Israeli soldiers forcibly removed Ballal from an ambulance that had arrived to provide medical assistance.
Abraham recounted the events on X, sharing a shaky cellphone video that captured masked settlers continuing their assault on the village. “They continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones,” he wrote.
Among those present were five Jewish-American activists participating in a three-month-long “co-resistance project” in Masafer Yatta, the region at the heart of No Other Land.
According to a statement from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, the activists had responded to distress calls from Susya as it came under attack.
However, upon attempting to retreat to their vehicle for safety, they were encircled by settlers who slashed their tires and shattered their windows with stones.
Basel Adra, a Palestinian resident of Masafer Yatta whose story is central to the documentary, later stood in Belal’s home beside the filmmaker’s seven-year-old son, Karam.
Reflecting on the violence, he wrote: “I am standing with Karam, Hamdan’s 7-year-old son, near the blood of Hamdan’s in his house, after settlers lynched him.” Ballal, he added, remained “missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding.”
“This is how they erase Masafer Yatta,” Adra lamented.
Violent assaults by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians, homes, and farmland have become distressingly routine, often escalating to deadly levels.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), at least 220 settler-led attacks have been documented in 2025 alone. Such attacks frequently involve arson, property destruction, and physical assaults on Palestinian residents.
A particularly harrowing case in 2015 saw an 18-month-old Palestinian infant burned to death when settlers set fire to a home in Duma, south of Nablus.
While former U.S. President Joe Biden imposed sanctions on certain Israeli settlers implicated in such violence, President Donald Trump has since lifted those sanctions, effectively removing a key punitive measure.
“Local and international activists regularly document the actions of settlers carrying out similar attacks, often calling the police for some sort of recourse, but settlers are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their crimes,” the Center for Jewish Nonviolence asserted in its statement.
Eyewitness accounts frequently describe Israeli military personnel either standing by as settlers attack or actively detaining Palestinians and foreign activists who attempt to resist the destruction of property.
44-year-old activist Alex Chabbott, recently deported from Israel and banned from re-entering the country, the West Bank, and Gaza for 99 years, spoke to Middle East Eye about the pervasive impunity settlers enjoy.
Chabbott was north of Masafer Yatta in the village of At-Tawani as part of the International Solidarity Movement when settlers, armed with assault rifles and knives, arrived to intimidate Palestinian families.
When Chabbott and a fellow activist began filming, they were intercepted by Israeli forces, searched, and falsely accused of bringing weapons.
“Then they realized that wasn’t the case,” Chabbott recalled. He described witnessing four Palestinian men, zip-tied and lying on the ground with their hands bound so tightly that their fingers had turned purple.
“We were there maybe for about half an hour. And basically, in that half hour, what it appears to me was happening was the settlers and the military were getting their story straight that they were going to make up,” he recounted. “I never got anyone else’s point of view [and they didn’t] interview the Palestinians.”
Chabbott was subsequently arrested, interrogated, and had his phone confiscated before being placed in detention and deported back to California.
He emphasized the dire reality faced by Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
“They literally have free reign to do whatever they want, whenever they want,” he stated.
“They can just come in, steal a bunch of stuff, break solar panels, and eventually, you know, some of these [Palestinian] families either get orders to leave by the military, their homes are destroyed, or some just give in because they’re like, ‘I can’t live like this anymore.’”
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