Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal, who co-directed the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land (2024), was attacked by Israeli settlers and taken by Israeli soldiers in the Occupied West Bank on Monday, March 24, according to the film’s co-director Yuval Abraham and as first reported by Al Jazeera. Ballal was held at a military base overnight, where he was allegedly beaten, and released on Tuesday, March 25, his fellow filmmakers said.
Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist and co-star of the film, said on X on Monday that Ballal was “lynched” by a group of Israeli settlers attacking his village, Susiya, located in the South Hebron Hills. Abraham said that Ballal sustained injuries to his head and stomach, and when an ambulance arrived for medical treatment, Israeli soldiers entered the vehicle and took him to an unknown location. Describing the attack as part of a “lynch mob,” Abraham said that Ballal’s whereabouts were unknown after he was hauled off by Israeli forces.
The activist group Center for Jewish Nonviolence told the Associated Press that dozens of settlers were involved in the attack, which left Ballal’s head visibly bloody. Witnesses also said Ballal was blindfolded as Israel forces detained him.
Footage taken by Canadian activist Anna Lipman that Abraham subsequently posted to X shows a masked individual whom he identified as a member of the mob beating an unidentified person, as Lipman runs away from the altercation and runs to a car off-frame for safety.
“[The settlers] continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones,” Abraham wrote in the post.
The next day, Abraham shared an update on X that Ballal has been freed after being held overnight at a military base. Palestinian journalist Basel Adra, who was also a co-director of No Other Land, shared photos on Instagram of a seemingly exhausted Ballal receiving medical treatment. The images showed what appeared to be blood stains on the front of Ballal’s shirt.
“He was beaten by soldiers and settlers all over his body,” Adra wrote in the caption of the post, adding that the director had been blindfolded.
Hyperallergic has contacted Abraham and No Other Land’s United Kingdom distributor, Dogwoof, for comment.
The incident comes in the wake of the film’s historic Oscar win for Best Feature-Length Documentary. Co-directed by two Israelis and two Palestinians, the 90-minute film chronicles the Israeli military’s destruction of homes and forced displacement of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.
The film documented Israeli settler violence in graphic detail, including a harrowing scene near the film’s end in which co-director Basel Adra’s own cousin is shot in the torso by an encroaching man with a gun in Masafer Yatta in the Occupied West Bank. Other scenes show Abraham yelling at soldiers who stand with Israeli men as they throw stones at Palestinian homes.
In a two-minute speech at the Academy Awards, Abraham and Adra spoke on behalf of the Israeli-Palestinian collective that produced the film and condemned Israel’s war on Gaza, demanding “serious actions to stop injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.” Ballal did not make remarks during the award speech.
The target of a global censorship campaign, the film still lacks a distributor in the United States. This month, in Miami Beach, Florida, the city’s Mayor Steven Meiner threatened to defund and evict an independent cinema for refusing to cancel screenings of the film. Last week, the public controversy came to a halt at a lengthy city commission meeting where dozens of local residents advocated in support of the theater’s freedom to screen the film. Ultimately, the mayor withdrew his proposal.
Editor’s note 3/25/25 11:30am EDT: This story was updated to reflect that Ballal was released from Israeli military custody and include new information about his detainment.