WEST BANK – Hamdan Ballal, the Oscar-winning director of the documentary “No Other Land”, has recounted the torture and abuse he faced by Israeli illegal settlers after he was released from his detention, reported TRT World.
Ballal said on Tuesday he had been assaulted by settlers the night before, after filming them attacking a neighbour’s house and then returning to ensure his own house was not attacked.
“I was just waiting outside, if any settlers or any army were attacking my home,” he told the Reuters news agency after being released from police custody.
He said he had been pushed to the ground, while soldiers yelled at him to stand up and pointed their guns at him. “It’s crazy, you can imagine your family, your kids inside the home, and you need to protect them,” he said.
A settler, he said, kicked his head “like a football” during a settler attack on his village.
Shortly before the incident, in which he ended up being arrested by Israeli security forces, a group of settlers attacked a gathering for Iftar at Susya village near Al Khalil.
Monday’s incident was the latest in which Israeli settlers have been accused of raiding Palestinian or Bedouin villages and encampments in the West Bank, sometimes to steal livestock. Palestinians and activists who monitor such attacks say the police and army typically stand by without intervening.
Lamia Ballal, the filmmaker’s wife, said settlers had gathered around the family house, and her husband had gone outside to prevent them from breaking in.
“The settlers attacked him and started beating him, and then they arrested him,” she told Reuters.
‘Targeted’
“No Other Land,” a film about the Israeli displacement of a Palestinian community, co-directed by Palestinian and Israeli directors, won the Oscar for Best Documentary at this year’s Academy Awards.
Ballal said one of the settlers who took part in the assault was well known to him.
“This is not the first time,” he said. He has attacked my home many times and also has grazed his cows in the garden of my house.”
Ballal doesn’t speak Hebrew, but he said he heard them saying his name and the word “Oscar.”
“I realised they were attacking me specifically,” he said in an interview at a West Bank hospital after his release on Tuesday. “When they say ‘Oscar’, you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to the claims that soldiers beat Ballal. The settler whom Ballal identified as his attacker, Shem Tov Luski — who has threatened Ballal in the past — denied he or the soldiers beat him.
Basel Adra, one of the film’s other co-directors, said he believed the settlers had taken the army to the family house as revenge for the film’s depiction of the Masafer Yatta area near where Monday’s incident occurred.
“Because he carries his camera and documents what is going on, I think he is targeted, and he was avenged this way at night,” he said.
