Palestinian Oscar winner severely beaten by Israeli settlers

From left: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, and Yuval Abraham pose with the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film for ‘No Other Land’ at the 97th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, on March 2, 2025.

Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning ‘No Other Land’, returned from Los Angeles three weeks ago

By Yasmine El-Sabawi, Reposted from Middle East Eye , 24 March, 2025

Palestinian film director and Academy Award-winner Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked 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.

Susya is also the site of an Israeli settlement, which is illegal under international law and something most American administrations have agreed violates Article 49 of the Geneva Convention.

Ballal’s whereabouts are now unknown after Israeli soldiers then seized him from the ambulance that arrived to treat him, his co-director and fellow Oscar winner of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham, said on X.

UPDATE: Ballal was released from detention on Tuesday, a day after being injured and arrested. He said he was kept blindfolded for more than 20 hours, sitting on the floor under a blasting air conditioner. The soldiers kicked, punched or hit him with a stick whenever they came on their guard shifts, he said.

Ballal doesn’t speak Hebrew, but he said he heard them saying his name and the word “Oscar.” Lea Tsemel, the attorney representing Ballal and the two other Palestinians detained with him, said they were taken to an army base, where they only received minimal care for their injuries from the attack. She said they had no access to them for several hours after their arrest.

Abraham, a journalist for +972 magazine, said in a separate post featuring a shaky cell phone video that masked settlers “attacked Hamdan’s village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones”.

The five Jewish-American activists at the scene “are participating in a three-month-long co-resistance project” in Masafer Yatta, the village at the heart of No Other Land, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence said in a statement released on Monday.

Masafer Yatta is a short drive southeast of Susiya.

The activists “responded to calls to come and support the village of Susiya while it was under attack,” and “when the activists returned to their car to seek shelter, the settlers surrounded the car, slashed its tires, and smashed the windows with stones”, the statement read.

Basel Adra, the Palestinian resident of Masafer Yatta whose story is told in the film, said on Monday that he was “standing with Karam, Hamdan’s 7-year-old son, near the blood of Hamdan’s in his house, after settlers lynched him”.

Ballal “is still missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding”, Adra said.

“This is how they erase Masafer Yatta.”

Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their homes and farms are commonplace. The attacks are often violent and can be deadly and can include the torching of property and animals and the beatings of residents.

The United Nations humanitarian agency, OCHA, has documented at least 220 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in 2025 alone.

In a particularly gruesome case in 2015, an 18-month-old Palestinian boy was burned to death when settlers torched a home in Duma, south of Nablus.

Former US President Joe Biden sanctioned a number of Israeli settlers for carrying out such attacks, but President Donald Trump has since lifted those sanctions.

“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 said.

‘Their hands were purple’

Eyewitnesses have often recounted how the Israeli military either stands by as settlers carry out attacks or arrests the Palestinians and foreign activists who are defending the property.

Middle East Eye recently spoke to 44-year-old activist Alex Chabbott, who was deported back to the US this month and banned from re-entering Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza “for 99 years”.

Chabbott was just north of Masafer Yatta in at-Tawani, as part of the International Solidarity Movement, when he said Israeli settlers arrived with assault rifles and knives to confront Palestinian families.

When Chabbott and a fellow activist began filming, they were stopped by Israeli forces, searched, and accused of being the ones who brought the knives.

“Then they realised that wasn’t the case,” Chabbott told MEE.

“They had these four Palestinian men zip-tied on the ground, with zip ties that were super tight. Their hands were purple,” he said.

“And 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. I never got anyone else’s point of view [and they didn’t] interview the Palestinians.”

Chabbott was arrested and interrogated, had his phone confiscated, and was put into a detention cell before being sent back to California.

He stressed the need for Americans to understand that there is no protection for Palestinian families in the West Bank as the number of Israeli settlements grows.

“They literally have free rein to do whatever they want, whenever they want,” he told MEE.

“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’.”

Yasmine El-Sabawi is a Palestinian-Canadian reporter and producer.

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