Update: Yuval Abraham has stated on X that “After being handcuffed all night and beaten in a military base, Hamdan Ballal is now free and is about to go home to his family.”

Previously reported:

Jewish activists have shared that Oscar-winning Palestinian film director Hamdan Ballal was attacked by Israeli settlers on Monday in the occupied West Bank. The activist group, Center for Jewish Nonviolence, said Ballal was also detained by the Israeli military after he was left bleeding from the attack.

What happened to Hamdan Ballal?

Ballal was being treated in an ambulance after he was attacked by settlers in Susiya, a Palestinian village in the area of Masafer Yatta, but soldiers detained him a short time later, activists said, per the Associated Press.

“We don’t know where Hamdan is because he was taken away in a blindfold,” activist Josh Kimelman told The Associated Press, per ABC News.

Sources added that Ballal, who is one of the co-directors of the recent, Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was attacked by about 20 masked settlers along with other Jewish activists. The attackers beat the group with stones and sticks, then broke their car windows and slashed their tires, activists said. The Center for Jewish Nonviolence also showed a video of one of the settlers swinging his fists at a pair of activists as the chaos unfolded at night.

“Get in, get in!” one person is heard saying in the video as the group tries to dodge rocks.

The driver is also heard saying  “Car window was broken” while trying to drive off as quick as possible.  

What co-director Yuval Abraham says about what happened

Yuval Abraham, one of the other co-directors of No Other Land, said on X (formerly Twitter): “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.”

He later clarified his use of the term “lynched.”

Why are Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in Masafer Yatta?

According to the AP, the Israeli military expelled residents from Masafer Yatta in the 1980s after designating the area as a training zone. While some residents remained in the area, soldiers continued to destroy their homes.

What is ‘No Other Land’ about?

No Other Land was also directed by Abraham, Basel Adra, and Rachel Szor.

Per its official description: Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.

In a previous directors’ statement, the four said, “We’re making this film together, a Palestinian-Israeli group of activists and filmmakers, because we want to stop the ongoing expulsion of the community of Masafer Yatta, and resist the reality of Apartheid we were born into – from opposite, unequal sides. Reality around us is becoming scarier, more violent, more oppressive, every day – and we are very weak in front of it. We can only shout out something radically different, this film – which at its core, is a proposal for an alternate way Israelis and Palestinians can live in this land – not as oppressor and oppressed, but in full equality.”

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