Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” was attacked by Israeli settlers and arrested by soldiers while being treated for his injuries, according to social media posts by fellow director Yuval Abraham.
“A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co-director of our film ‘No Other Land.’ They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since,” Abraham posted Monday on X.
But other witnesses said that a stone-throwing fight broke out between Israelis and Palestinians after an Israeli shepherd was attacked by Palestinians, according to witnesses who spoke to Israel Hayom, a Hebrew-language daily newspaper.
Three Palestinians were arrested in connection to the fight, including Ballal. Israel Hayom reached out to the IDF for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
Activists from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence who spoke to the Associated Press said that Ballal was “taken away in a blindfold” by Israeli military as he was being treated in an ambulance.
“A group of 10-20 masked settlers attacked him and other Jewish activists with stones and sticks, and smashed their car windows and slashed their tires,” representatives from the group told AP.
“No Other Land,” is a documentary made over four years by the filmmaking team of Palestinian West Bank residents Ballal and Basel Adra alongside Israelis Abraham and Rachel Szor, all of whom attended the Oscars earlier this month and received the award for Best Documentary Feature. The film chronicles the destruction of Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank hamlet of Masafer Yattaby by Israeli settlers after a 2019 Israeli court ruling upheld the area as a “military zone.”
Since the film’s premiere at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, Ballal, Abraham and Adra have continued to post photos and videos of attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, with Ballal’s most recent post on Instagram coming six hours before Abraham said he had been attacked and detained.
Abraham provided a more detailed account of the alleged attack against Ballal in a follow-up post written in Hebrew, along with videos of Israeli settlers attacking CJN activists and throwing stones at their cars. As reports of the Palestinians’ attack on an Israeli shepherd continue in local media, it remains unclear exactly how the clash first came about.
“They beat him in the head and all over his body. While wounded and bleeding, soldiers entered the ambulance he had called and arrested him. He has since disappeared and it is unclear whether he is receiving medical treatment or what is happening to him,” Abraham wrote.
“No Other Land” has not received a distributor in the United States and has been screening in 138 theaters through an independent booker. It has continued to make headlines after Miami Beach mayor Steven Meiner threatened to cancel the lease of the arthouse theater O Cinema for screening the film, arguing the theater was “normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach.”
Meiner withdrew the proposed lease termination last week after facing significant opposition from a majority of members of the Miami Beach City Commission and residents who attended the commission meeting.