Israeli police release Oscar-winning director

Jerusaluem: Israeli authorities have released a Palestinian director of an Oscar-winning documentary who was detained overnight, after what he and witnesses said was an attack by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Police said the filmmaker, Hamdan Ballal, one of the directors of the documentary, No Other Land, was questioned along with two other Palestinians on suspicion of hurling stones, property damage and “endangering regional security.” All three deny the accusations, their lawyer said.

Hamdan Ballal, Oscar-winning Palestinian director of No Other Land, is released from a police station in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba a day after being detained by the Israeli army following an alleged attack by Jewish settlers.Credit: AP

The details of the episode are still not entirely clear, and both sides provided conflicting accounts of the events surrounding Ballal’s detention. But witnesses said the detention took place as a group of Israeli settlers — some of whom were masked — carried out an assault in the outskirts of Ballal’s home village of Susya in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

After his release on Tuesday, Ballal, 37, said he had been guarding his home during the attack, worried that the settlers would try to barge in. Suddenly, a man struck Ballal on the head while two Israeli soldiers leveled their guns at him, he said.

“I fell to the ground and then the man beat me all over my body,” Ballal said in a phone interview.

Israeli soldiers later arrested Ballal and held him overnight. Ballal said he was blindfolded while soldiers placed different objects on his head and mocked him, saying: “This is the Oscar-winning filmmaker.”

Hamdan Ballal (third from left) with Basel Adra (left), Rachel Szor, and Yuval Abraham won best documentary feature film for No Other Land, at the Oscars earlier this month.Credit: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on Ballal’s account.

One Israeli settler, a minor, was also detained. Israeli police said he had been released to receive medical treatment and would be questioned later.

The episode drew attention to rising attacks by hard-line Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. During the past year, Jewish extremists have thrown rocks at Palestinians, set cars on fire and defaced homes. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 1,000 incidents of settler violence in 2024.

Human rights groups have long said that Israeli officials rarely crack down on the perpetrators. Despite a handful of high-profile prosecutions, a vast majority of police investigations into attacks by Israelis on Palestinians are closed without charges, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group.

President Donald Trump has taken a softer stance on settler violence, cancelling sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against individuals accused of carrying out violent acts against Palestinians. On Tuesday, a confirmation hearing for Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel and an outspoken supporter of settlement building, was underway.

The two sides provided different accounts about the events surrounding Ballal’s arrest. In a statement, the Israeli military said “several terrorists” had hurled stones at Israeli vehicles, igniting a violent confrontation in which Israelis and Palestinians threw rocks at one another.

Nasser Nawaja, a fieldworker for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem who lives in Susya, and other Palestinians said the confrontation began after the town’s residents had sought to drive away Israeli shepherds herding livestock on land claimed by the village.

The group of Israeli assailants, some masked, soon joined the others on the outskirts of the village, where they attacked two Palestinian homes, they said.

Witness videos obtained and reviewed by The New York Times showed part of the assault. In cellphone and dashcam footage, a masked man approaches three activists who had responded to calls from Palestinians for help, pushes them and tries to punch one of them. The three activists retreat to their car as several other masked men run toward it and smash the windshield with a rock.

Basel Adra, another director of the documentary, who was also on the scene, said Israeli soldiers and police officers on the scene did little to stop the masked Israeli assailants, even as they sought to disperse the Palestinians. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the claim.

Ballal was among four directors — the others were Adra, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — in the Palestinian-Israeli film collective that received the Academy Award for best documentary this month. The film documents the demolition of West Bank residents’ homes in or near the villages of Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces claiming the area for a live-fire military training ground.

Ballal (right) is checked at a hospital in Hebron, a day after being detained by the Israeli army.Credit: AP

After enduring repeated attacks, Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank, including from Hamdan’s village, took their case to the Israeli Supreme Court at the end of 2023, arguing that Israeli security authorities were not protecting them from attacks, and that as a result, some villagers had fled their homes.

In a ruling last year, the court expressed concern over Israel’s failure to protect them and said the government — including the Israeli military — must protect Palestinians against future attacks “even in the complicated circumstances of this period.”

With Malachy Browne

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.